Entertainment Weekly discovered that some authors like to mess with the tradition of the author bio. They found three: Mindy Kaling, Lemony Snicket, and Eric Carle:

“Eric Carle invented writing, the airplane, and the internet. He was also the first person to reach the North Pole. He has flown to Mars and back in one day, and was enthusiastically greeted by the Martians. “Very strange beings,” he reported on his return. He has written one thousand highly regarded books; a team of experts is presently attempting to grasp their meaning. “It might take a century,” said the chief expert. Carle is also a great teller of stories — but not all of them are true, for instance those in this book.”

While these bios are pretty good, they’ve got nothing on Harlan Ellison.

“HARLAN ELLISON” is the anagrammatic pseudonym of Ranisha Lonell, a 66 year old great-grandmother who, at the age of fifty, absented herself from the material world to join an order of nuns dedicated to the preservation of the wonders of nature. As Sister Marcelina, her leadership of the Ausuble Chasm protest sit-in and the Joshua Tree National Forest intervention brought her to national attention in 1979, at which time her literary career as “Harlan Ellison” was revealed for the first time in a major New York Review of Books essay by Jacques Barzun. Her monograph comparing the Lupe Velez “Mexican Spitfire” films of the early 1940’s with the “Gidget” cinematic cycle has been praised by Cahiers due Cinema as “a work of film scholarship worthy of Ronald Firbank.” Today, withdrawn behind convent walls and a vow of silence, Ranisha Lonell, Sister Marcelina, continues to write her vegetarian recipes and an occasional book of trenchant essays about the world she has disavowed. Her limp has not improved.

There are more at the link.

Link to the rest at Entertainment Weekly.

Posted by guest blogger Meryl Yourish

PG warning – This site is addictive.

From Six Word Memoirs:

Six day, sixth month: say it.

. . . .

Intense, climatic writing comes in spurts.

. . . .

Can’t fit in my comfort zone.

. . . .

Books are my types of movies.

. . . .

Seeking knight in well damaged armor.

. . . .

Piñata purchased for anger management therapy.

. . . .

Temptation never knocks. Temptation has keys.

. . . .

Not letting go. Just adjusting grip.

Link to the rest at Six Word Memoirs

For readers from outside of the U.S., today is celebrated as Memorial Day in the United States.

Cities and towns across the United States host Memorial Day parades each year, often incorporating military personnel and members of veterans’ organizations. Some of the largest parades take place in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. Americans also observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries and war memorials. On a less somber note, many people throw parties and barbecues on the holiday, perhaps because it unofficially marks the beginning of summer.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Throughout the months-long dispute between Amazon and Hachette over e-book sales terms, Douglas Preston was one of the most outspoken authors on the matter. He went so far as to form a group to give authors a voice in the stalemate: Authors United.

. . . .

“I came into this a loyal Amazon customer, grateful to Amazon for selling my books,” said Preston. During the dispute, his then-forthcoming novel Blue Labyrinth (Nov., HBG), cowritten with Lincoln Child, looked like it could suffer collateral damage when Amazon removed the buy buttons for preorders and slowed shipping for Hachette titles—but he said that wasn’t his concern for starting Authors United.

. . . .

Preston said he was “shocked” by the decline in sales overall for Hachette titles through Amazon. To convey the scale of Amazon’s so-called shenanigans, Preston said that Amazon had to order more than one million copies of Hachette titles to restock after the two companies settled their differences. More than 3,000 authors and 8,000 titles were affected, and it took two weeks, from November 12 to November 26, the day before Thanksgiving, for Amazon to bring its inventory back to pre-sanction levels, he said.

Preston’s disillusionment with Amazon dates back to his first phone call with Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior v-p of Kindle content, when Preston thought that if Amazon understood how bad they were hurting authors they would change their tactics. Preston said that authors tend to think of their books like children, so Amazon’s actions struck especially close to the bone and felt, to many, like a personal attack. It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that Preston realized, to Amazon, books are a commodity like TV sets and diapers. “Amazon started with the assumption that all the authors wanted was money,” said Preston. “What we really want is an audience and to get people to read our books.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Dave for the tip.

From The Toast:

1. You are either a virgin or a sad and lovely widow whose husband was lost at sea. You are spirited, but still passing ladylike.

2. Your father is away in the colonies protecting his tobacco interests, or a bumbling idiot, or a gambler. His character flaws lead to you becoming betrothed to a man you’ve never met.

. . . .

 8. A notorious rake catches your eye at a fashionable social function. His brocaded—though not foppishly so—waistcoat betrays his unimaginable wealth. His eyes smolder like sapphires pulled from the inferno itself. He raises his glass to you with a ravenous smile.

. . . .

10. You have a secret, potentially scandalous alter-ego, such as authoress of smutty literature or highwayman. Your true identity is under heated debate by the Ton. In your spare time you give baskets of food to the poor and practice the pianoforte and/or mandolin.

11. You are proposed marriage to by no less than three vicars every Tuesday. You refuse them with delicacy, then weep into the rosebushes on the east veranda. Your heart belongs to another.

12. A wealthy and influential harridan disapproves of you and makes sure everyone within earshot knows it. You don’t give a fig what she thinks. You flutter your fan defiantly.

Link to the rest at The Toast and thanks to Scott for the tip.

The Passive Voice had some problems with DNS Servers and at least one plugin, but we’re back up, albeit looking a little strange.

PG will be playing with plugins to see if he can isolate the culprit, but the site should be generally available going forward.

New posts will start happening tomorrow – Tuesday – since all of PG’s blog time and then some has been consumed in conversations with tech support and editing PHP files today.

Leave a comment if you see weird things happening or you can email PG at passiveguy[at]thepassivevoice.com

by Jill O’Rourke at Crushable

I don’t know what your plans are for this weekend, but mine definitely involve not seeing Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Mostly because I don’t have time in my schedule to recite that title to the person in the box office. And also because it looks terrible, horrible, no good and very bad. (I know, I’m so original.) Some people are saying nice things about it, though. Like the author of the book, Judith Viorst. Her recent interview with Vulture, before she saw the film, made it sound like she maybe wanted to distance herself from it:

“You know, it’s their version of the movie. I already had my version,” she says, referring to a charming stage musical that was produced a few years ago. “So I was able to let it go.”

But then she spoke to EW after seeing it and said some very nice things. Phew. It would have been awkward if she wasn’t happy with it, right?

Right. It would have. And it has been. Because sometimes authors see the movies based on their work — or just witness what the filmmakers are doing to it during production — and aren’t satisfied. Just because you give permission for someone to adapt your book doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy about the result. Some of those dissatisfied authors have been vocal about their disappointment. These are their stories.

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2. Stephen King, The Shining

King has made several negative comments over the years about Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel. He felt that many of the book’s most important themes were ignored and the supernatural elements downplayed. More recently he also declared Kubrick’s depiction of Shelley Duvall’s character to be misogynistic:
“Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”

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5. Winston Groom, Forrest Gump

Groom’s problem with the Oscar-winning adaptation of his novel was that they didn’t even pay him for it, with producers claiming it was because the movie didn’t turn a profit. He had to sue to get the money he was owed, and he started his Forrest Gump sequel with this line: “Don’t never let nobody make a movie of your life’s story.” BURN.

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8. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Here’s another author who’s complained about more than one adaptation. For American Psycho, he’s said he doesn’t think any film adaptation would work because of the nature of the book:

“American Psycho was a book I didn’t think needed to be turned into a movie. I think the problem with American Psycho was that it was conceived as a novel, as a literary work with a very unreliable narrator at the center of it and the medium of film demands answers. It demands answers. You can be as ambiguous as you want with a movie, but it doesn’t matter — we’re still looking at it. It’s still being answered for us visually.”

9. Audrey Geisel, The Cat in the Hat

Audrey Geisel is Dr. Seuss’s widow, and she was not happy with the way her late husband’s classic book was adapted for the screen. You know, in that really stupid movie with Mike Myers? If you ever wonder why we haven’t seen any more live-action Dr. Seuss adaptations, it’s because Mrs. Geisel forbade it.

Read the rest here.

From Guest Blogger Randall

Homeless Outreach in Volumes: Books by Bike for ‘Outside’ People in Oregon

By KIRK JOHNSON.

A homeless man named Daniel was engrossed in a Barbara Kingsolver novel when his backpack was stolen recently, and Laura Moulton was determined to set things to right.

Ms. Moulton, 44, an artist, writer and adjunct professor of creative nonfiction, did not know Daniel’s last name, his exact age, or really even how to find him — they had met only once. But she knew the novel, “Prodigal Summer,” and that was a start. So, armed with a new copy of the book, off she went.

Such is the life of a street librarian.

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“Is Daniel around?” she asked a patron, Laura King, having just trundled up on the Street Books three-wheeler on a recent afternoon for a stop near the Willamette River northeast of downtown.

Ms. King, 41, a reader of inspirational biographies and essays, had stepped over from an area of tarps and tents, and was peering into the big wooden book cabinet mounted on the trike’s front end. She shook her head.

“I have a book for him, which I’d be happy to leave with you,” Ms. Moulton said.

Ms. King shrugged and said, “If something happens, and I don’t see him before I see you, I’ll give it back.”

Ms. Moulton’s reply, extending her hand with the book she had bought that morning, was pure librarian: “You ought to read it in the meantime,” she said.

A concrete reality anchors Street Books to the real word: Portlanders are readers. The Multnomah County Library has the third-highest circulation among public libraries in the nation, after New York’s and King County’s in Seattle, according to the American Library Association’s public library division. The ranking is all the more impressive for Multnomah’s size, having only a little more than half of King County’s population, and a quarter of New York’s.

A second reality is that like so many other institutions in the digital age, libraries are redefining themselves, scrambling to stay relevant and find the toehold that keeps them linked to a city’s life.

Multnomah’s library, for example, helped by a grant from the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, started a project this spring called My Librarian, which enlists library staff members as online book-list mavens who share their reading passions with library patrons by email or video chat.

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The Street Books project is nothing if not messy. The librarians — the three salaried employees, including Ms. Moulton, are paid $60 a week for a three-hour shift — fill their carts based on their tastes and their patrons’ tastes.

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Ms. Taliaferro, a high-energy red-haired 37-year-old who arrived in Portland on a bus in 1995 and never left, came by Ms. Moulton’s cart this week looking to build a reading list for a friend in the low-income housing project where she lives. She said she hardly ever uses a regular library because of the rules and fines and library cards, and the worries about losing books. Street Books has no return policy at all, except a kind of when-you-are-done-reading, next-time-we-meet handshake agreement.

“You wouldn’t be able to get a copy of ‘Lord of the Flies’ would you?” she said. “I need ‘Lord of the Flies’; I need ‘1984’; and I need

‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” she said.

“You’re going straight for the summer beach reads,” Ms. Moulton said, writing down the titles in her notebook.

“He’s never read them, never even heard of them,” Ms. Taliaferro said of her friend. So she’s fixing that — building a reading list for him based on her own experiences and memories of books that resonated long after the final pages.

“I remember reading them and being changed by each one of them — how can you even know what the world is until you’ve got those stories in you?” she said.

Read the rest here.

From Guest Blogger Randall