The Ocean at the End of the Lane & other bits of publishery news

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Ocean at the End of the Lane & other bits of publishery news

I had a meeting at Harper Collins. They showed me the mock-ups of covers for THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, my next novel for adults, which comes out in the US and the UK on June the 18th 2013. I really like the direction they are going in. I have no image to show you, though, not yet.

Here's a 1947 Life magazine (I think) photo taken in Weeki Wachi that I love, and that I sent to the publishers when we first started talking about cover designs, for you to look at while you're waiting for the real cover.

And here's a photograph of me climbing down a drainpipe in the spring of 1968.

The publishers' description of the book:

The Ocean At The End of the Lane is a novel about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us.

It began for our narrator forty years ago when he was seven: the lodger stole the family's car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed.  Creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and a menace unleashed -- within his family, and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. 

His only defense is three women, on a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac -- as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark.

It's already up on Amazon US for pre-order.

And I'm really nervous. It's an astonishingly personal sort of a novel. (And, although it has a very young protagonist, it really isn't a book for children.)

I got a note from my Polish translator the other day saying that it made her cry, and I know it was just bought in Brazil, so I hope it will be coming out in other countries relatively close to to US & UK publication date.

...

Also, Amazon has an image of the new US paperback cover of American Gods up.

There will be a uniform set of paperback covers for the first time in the US coming out over the next year -- different colours and images, but they'll look and feel a lot like this.

Harpers asked me to mention that they have a sale on right now on the Enhanced ebook of American Gods. It comes with some audio-visual content (although some people with regular Kindles have said on Twitter that they got the regular version when they bought it).

Here's the AMAZON Link.

Here's the Barnes and Noble link.

and here's the ITunes link.

The sale runs until election day - November the 6th. The links probably won't work if you're outside the US. Sorry about that.

...

Last night I saw Helen and Edgar, Edgar Oliver's one man play/ performance/virtuoso piece of first person storytelling. It's in a small theatre, Theatre 80, at 80 St Mark's, and it runs until October the 27th.  

It was funny and it was heartbreaking, something both at the same time. It was a triumph, got a standing ovation, and as I listened to the people in the audience talking about coming back and bringing their friends, I thought I should blog about it now, because otherwise there will not be any tickets available if someone out there wants one.

And if you are in New York, you should want one. There is nothing like Edgar's voice, and his stories (all true, all personal) about growing up in Savannah as part of a family of three - his sister Helen, a year older than he was, himself, and is mother, who was quite mad, and a painter, and was thought locally to be a witch because when she was too troubled she would climb onto the roof and rant at the heavens -- are like no-one else's stories. 

When he did his last one man story, Edgar was reviewed in the New York Times thus:

Mr. Oliver is a living work of theater all by himself, and the gestures of his pale, long-fingered hands and the restless expressiveness of his hollowed-out eyes seem completely of a piece with his benevolent horror-movie voice.

But there's nothing horror-movie about Helen and Edgar (except for the story about the swimming pool and the watermelons, of course). It's really gentle. It's a love story about family, and how families buoy you up, and shape you, and how you escape them.

...

Finally, the Humble Bundle. Would you like a ebook of the graphic novel SIGNAL TO NOISE, by me and Dave Mckean? How about books by John Scalzi or Corey Doctorow, or Kelly Link? And would you like to be able to get most of them on a PAY WHAT YOU WANT basis? With money going to three excellent charities? And with you able to decide how much money goes to whom?

And it's DRM free?

Well, for the next two weeks only, you can. Just head over to http://www.humblebundle.com/

 It was launched yesterday and already over 31,000 have been downloaded. People have paid an average price of about $12 for their bundles so far.

(You have to pay above the average donation to get The Old Man's War and Signal to Noise. That amount has crept up over the last 24 hours.)

Head over and look at the Humble Bundle website, where you will learn that Mac users are more generous than Windows users, and that Linux users are the most generous people of all.

ANNA KARENINA

Dir: Joe Wright. UK. 2012. 130mins

A bold, evocative and stimulating theatrical – in many senses of the word – version of Leo Tolstoy’s much filmed novel, Joe Wright’s vision of this obsessive love story set against the opulent backdrop of high society in imperial Russia in the 1870s will challenge audience expectations while also thrill those willing to go along with the swirling cinematic style.

While the story is a familiar one the new production at very least offers a bold, stirring and at times entrancing version.

Anna Karenina, which opens in the UK on September 7 prior to a North American premiere at Toronto, also features a captivating lead performance by Keira Knightley as Anna. A lyrical and elegant production, the clever staging brings the best out of Tom Stoppard intelligent, amusing and complex script, and while the structure and affectations may not appeal to purists it allows Wright to tell an epic love story in a lush and sumptuous manner.
It is the third time she and Wright have worked together – she also starred in his films Pride & Prejudice and Atonement – and he clearly brings out the best in her. Knightley is an actress who divides opinion, but there is no denying the camera loves her face and in period frocks there in no one to beat her. Her Anna impressive here – strikingly beautiful when filmed in a veil looking longingly at a young man who captures her heart, but also driven by a fierce logic and intelligence that makes her want to strive for the love she thinks she deserves even though deep down she knows she can never survive the harsh glare of society.
Beautiful Anna Karenina is married to staid but loyal Karenin (a buttoned-up Jude Law, whose solidity is the perfect balance to Anna’s wilfulness), a high-ranking government official, and they have a young son and a strong social standing in St Petersburg. Called to Moscow by her errant brother Oblonsky (a terrific performance by Matthew Macfadyen, offering genial comedy to the role), whose philandering ways have final caused havoc to his marriage to Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), and he hopes Anna can try and ease the problems between them.
On the train to Moscow, Anna meets Countess Vronsky (Olivia Williams) who is met at the station by her son, dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky (played with youthful enthusiasm by a blonde-haired moustache-twirling Aaron Taylor-Johnson). When they are introduced there is an instant attraction between Vronsky and her.
Also visiting the Oblonsky household is his best friend Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a sensitive – and therefore heavily bearded and with long, lank, hair – landowner who plans to ask Dolly’s sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander) to marry him. But she is entranced by Vronsky, who leaves her heartbroken at a lavish ball when he pursues Anna. Levin leaves from his Pokrovskoe estate, determined to work the land and forget Kitty.
Anna returns to St Petersburg, but Vronsky follows her with the two eventually embarking on a passionate affair that scandalises St Petersburg society and finally places Karenin in a position where he must give his wife an ultimatum…to put the affair aside and return to him and their son, or to lose her place in society. While Anna thinks she can have everything – a love affair, her place in society and her son – but there are terrible consequences to her obsessive romance.
Forsaking traditional sets and locations, for much of the film the story is set within a massive and rather rambling theatre – there are scenes that emphasise the expanse of Russia, particularly when the film focuses on Levin’s farm – with scenes set on the stage itself as well as in the lower levels, elevated rigging, mirrored galleries and against painted backdrops.
And for much of the first half of the film Wright keeps things moving with a real sense of energy, to the degree that it is only when Anna returns to St Petersburg that the rhythm settles to a more modest pace. Particularly striking early in the film is the opulent ball where Vronsky and Anna first dance, with original and rather erotic (though never overt) choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui helping give the film a strange and wonderful quality.
Beautifully shot by Seamus McGarvey (a rather change of pace and style from Marvel’s The Avengers) and with elegant production design by Sarah Greenwood, Anna Karenina is likely to divide opinion – in a similar way Keira Knightley seems to divide audiences – but while the story is a familiar one the new production at very least offers a bold, stirring and at times entrancing version. It is long certainly, and at times the Levin subplot hampers the flow of the story, but the performances are all impressive and as stories of obsessive love go it is a gripping and moving film.

Production company: Working Title
International distribution: Universal Pictures
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Webster
Executive producer: Liza Chasen
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novella by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Editor: Melanie Ann Oliver
Production designer: Sarah Greenwood
Music: Dario Marianelli
Main cast: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Olivia Williams, Emily Watson, Holiday Grainger, David Wilmot

All Hallow’s Read

LitStackEditor 18 October, 2012 Of Interest

Neil Gaiman, author of things, explains All Hallow’s Read, a Tradition that was just waiting to happen. Full Details at www.allhallowsread.com. Nobody was actually killed during the making of this video.
And give someone a scary book at Hallowe’en.
Source

Anna Karenina and Les Misérables’ Producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner to be Honored by the Hollywood Film Awards

Posted by Sasha Stone on Sep 19, 2012 in Anna Karenina, Awards, Les Miserables | 2 comments

The 16th Annual Hollywood Film Awards, presented by the “Los Angeles Times, ” announced today that it will be honoring producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner with this year’s “Hollywood Producers Award.”
More info at the Hollywood Film Awards
Read More

Keira Knightley Singled out for Brave Performance in Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Sep 11, 2012 in Anna Karenina | 46 comments

TIME mag just wrote a rave review for Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina. Knightley has been quietly challenging the roles she seemed destined to play with last year’s A Dangerous Method and now, with Anna Karenina. Richard Corliss writes of Knightley:

The novel has been filmed at least two dozen times, including silent and sound-movie versions, in 1927 and 1935, with Greta Garbo, and a 1948 film with Vivien Leigh. Two of the most incandescent stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age would be tough competition for Knightley, if she were playing the same kind of Anna. But guided by Wright, her director for Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish woman who has never felt erotic love; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame. It’s a nervy performance, acutely attuned to the volcanic changes a naive creature must enjoy and endure on her first leap into mad passion. She helps make Anna Karenina an operatic romance worth singing about.

Philip French writes:

Still, Knightley’s Anna has the right combination of passion, confusion, cruelty and near madness, and there’s a brilliant moment (which comes out of the novel) where she reveals her physical revulsion for her husband by angrily criticising his irritating habit of cracking his knuckles.

But there is no getting around the fact that the film’s reception will be mixed. It appears as though Joe Wright turned and did something no one expected him to do – he filmed the Anna Karenina no one expected him to make. Did you all just think Anna Karenina would be kind of by-the-numbers Wright and Knightley? But the critics instead seemed half-baffled by it.  It is perhaps one of those films you either go with or you don’t. Unfortunately, it is one of the few Big Oscar Movies with a plot that revolves around a female character. In fact, it might be the ONLY one. I’m rooting for it but haven’t yet seen it.
Read More

Lovely New Poster for Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Jul 7, 2012 in Anna Karenina, Posters | 22 comments

From FirstShowing:

Bigger version under cut.
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New Pics from Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Jun 8, 2012 in 85th Academy Awards, Anna Karenina, featured, Joe Wright | 56 comments

Beautiful pics from the new Wright/Knightley period pic, Anna Karenina. Directors never seem to tire of dressing Knightley up in the old fashioned way.  Anna Karenina is shortlisted as a potential Oscar contender, which only means it adds up to Oscar catnip by all accounts: pretty white people in a period film with heavy subject matter. Or you could say Joe Wright (Atonement), plus Tom Stoppard doing the adaptation, plus Knightley and Jude Law=Oscar in one way or another. Let’s start with Best Picture, but you could probably add Best Actress, Costume, Art Direction without breaking  a sweat.
The Oscar game is just too easy sometimes.
So this only has to not screw up to be one of the remaining contenders. It should do very well with the HFPA to get things started off nicely. How can you say that without having seen it yet, you might ask? Practice, practice.  The novel has been remade into many films over the years. And now Joe Wright and Keira Knightley will add their mark to the pole in this, their 3rd collaboration together.
Gallery after the cut.

‘anna karenina’ premiere: keira knightley

 

keira knightly made her much awaited return to the red carpet for the premiere of probably her biggest movie to date, anna karenina. 

keira wears a light peachy-pink gown from the fall 2012 chanel couture collection. the dress has a slight trumpet shaped skirt, floral applique and sheer flutter sleeves. the look is meant to be feminine and beautiful, like most of the gowns keira chooses for her red carpet looks.

i am a bit divided about this gown. am i the only one who thinks it looks a little stiff? or a lot stiff? there is no swish or movement in the fabric, giving it a very constricted feel. i also feel like the metallic should have been much thinner. on the other hand, keira still looks amazing. she makes it work. let us take a look at more pictures.

 

it’s so frustrating when i can’t decide!

Video: Watch A Clip of the Upcoming 'Anna Karenina' Film

LitStack Editors 25 July, 2012 Soundbites

Director Joe Wright and actress Keira Knightley have a successful working relationship, but will their third collaboration, “Anna Karenina,” finally result in Oscar gold?
The famed Russian tragedy follows Anna (Keira Knightley) as she falls in love with a calvary soldier (Aaron Johnson), which is a problem since she’s already married to a man 20 years her senior (Jude Law).
“Anna Karenina” has been turned into a feature film countless times before, but this version is a bit different, as Wright (“Atonement”) explains in the beginning of the clip. Wright aims to create a “fluid linearity” throughout the film, where actors can physically move from scene to scene. The film predominantly takes place in a dilapidated theater. “You can walk from one house, under the stage, straight off to the horse training ground and go through a door, and there’s a Russian landscape,” Wright explains in the clip.
The six-minute film sequence begins with Anna entering a beautiful ballroom — with a ceiling that opens to show a fireworks display — and ends in Anna’s chambers, where she has a chilling conversation with her husband Karenin. This theatrical take on Leo Tolstoy’s realist novel is sure to draw some skeptics, but with Wright at the helm — and playwright Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”) behind the script — the movie is pure Oscar bait.
In addition to Knightley (who co-starred in both “Atonement” and Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice”) and Johnson, the film features Kelly Macdonald, “Harry Potter” actor Domhnall Gleeson (Bill Weasley!) and Emily Watson. And yes, that is Michelle Dockery in the ballroom, playing a character that remarkably resembles her “Downton Abbey” persona Lady Mary.
“Anna Karenina” arrives in theaters on Nov. 9.

Source

AdSense for feeds is going away

After carefully evaluating the product, we’ve decided to retire the AdSense for feeds product.
The process will happen in two phases and your account will be affected, depending on your usage of the product. To check whether you’re currently generating any revenue from AdSense for feeds, run your “Products” performance report and review the listed products for recent data for "AdSense for feeds."
Choose the situation applies to you:

You’re not using the product

From October 2nd, 2012, you’ll no longer have the option to select “Adsense for feeds” from the More products menu in your My ads tab.

You’re currently serving ads on RSS feeds via AdSense

• On December 3rd, 2012, AdSense ads will stop serving on RSS feeds and you’ll no longer see feed units in your My ads tab.
• FeedBurner URLs powered by Google will continue to function. As a result, it won’t be necessary to redirect your subscribers to different URLs or to take any other action on the account.

Other AdSense products

Although AdSense for feeds is going away, this change won’t affect any other AdSense products you’re currently using or the availability of the other products to you.

Payments

Your AdSense for feeds units will continue to accrue earnings until December 3, when they will stop showing ads on your RSS feeds. As of the last day of December 2012, your earnings will be finalized as usual. At this point, one of the following will apply:

• If your earnings exceed the payment threshold, your account will be sent for approval for payment, and payments will be issued through the standard AdSense payment process.


• If your earnings do not exceed the payment threshold, but you use other AdSense products, your AdSense for feeds earnings will be accrued toward payment in a future period when your AdSense account does exceed the payment threshold.


• If your earnings do not exceed the payment threshold and you don’t use other AdSense products then the amount of accrued earnings from your AdSense for feeds units will remain as a balance in your AdSense account for as long as your account is open.

Reports and earnings

Reporting on AdSense for feeds and corresponding channels will remain available in your account. Even though you will no longer be able to access AdSense for feeds settings and channels, you will be able to see historical performance of them on the Performance reports tab in your AdSense account.