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Last week, we were all charmed by the story about how Brooklyn indie band Here We Go Magic randomly picked up John Waters hitchhiking in Ohio. But why was John Waters hitchhiking in Ohio? Because he is writing a book, tentatively titled Carsick, about his eight-day cross-country trip. He says everyone was "lovely." Good job on your manners, America!
In a continuing effort to understand just how Fifty Shades became so absurdly popular, let us point your attention to these GoodReads charts, which break down the site's E.L. James reviews by state and star rating. Turns out the books are most popular in the tristate area but most enjoyed in Mississippi and Nebraska. Meanwhile, they're least liked in Washington and Vermont, so residents there should continue to feel superior.
News many will be quickly thrilled by: Brooklyn author Jennifer Egan has composed a short story revolving around a character from her 2011 Pulitzer winner A Visit From the Goon Squad. News many may be instantly worried about/fearful of/angered by: This story, an 8,500-word piece, will debut on The New Yorker's NYerFiction Twitter account Thursday evening and be serialized over the span of ten nights, with one tweet posted per minute between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m. Eastern. Each tweet is a new entry in a spy's mission log; the tale is titled "Black Box."
Now let's take stock of what may and may not be awesome about this 2012 version of serialization.
The trailer for Baz Luhrmann's Great American (by way of Australia) Movie made its way on to the Internet last night, but we at Vulture have a lot of thoughts about this latest stab at The Great Gatsby, and we assume that you do too! (How could anyone not have opinions about that green cloche hat that Carey Mulligan Gemma Ward? Isla Fischer? is wearing around the 30-second mark?) So we now call to order a special meeting of the Trailer Mix Society in order to obsess over these two minutes in a proper fashion. Let's get it.
E.L. James’s “Mommy Porn” trilogy has held the 1-2-3 lock on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks now, and those numbers add up — to 10 million copies, in six weeks, says Knopf Doubleday. Another fun Fifty Shades fact: The books apparently saw a big sales jump right before Mother’s Day. So congrats, America, for finally taking that "just buy me something fun!" suggestion at face value. Your mom surely appreciates it.
"Mommy porn" Fifty Shades of Grey is headed to the big screen after taking the self-publishing world by storm, and it looks like it's started a fan fiction-to-film mini-bubble. Deadline just confirmed that 20th Century Fox and producer Ridley Scott have snatched up the movie rights to Wool, a $0.99 Kindle e-book from former yacht captain Hugh Howey about a world where the air is no longer breathable. The remaining humans must fight to stay alive underground, in the "spirit of The Hunger Games," or so the press release claims. Either this is a sign of the impending apocalypse, or society has just outgrown publishers.
Author Charlaine Harris says that she's ending her series of Sookie Stackhouse books. Dead Ever After, which comes out next May, will be the thirteenth and final installment of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Harris announced on Facebook. But there's still plenty of True Blood to be had, and there's nothing more fun than obsessively documenting the differences between books and TV shows. Nothing at all.
![TITLE: GODFATHER PART II, THE • PERS: PACINO, AL • YEAR: 1974 • DIR: COPPOLA, FRANCIS FORD • REF: GOD013AN • CREDIT: [ THE KOBAL COLLECTION / PARAMOUNT ]](http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2011/08/23/23_godfather2.o.jpg/a_146x97.jpg "http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2011/08/23/23_godfather2.o.jpg/a_146x97.jpg")
Almost three months ago, Paramount Pictures sued Godfather author Mario Puzo's estate to halt publication of an unauthorized prequel, The Family Corleone. The book came out this week anyway. It turns out Puzo's son agreed "several weeks ago" to put all the book's profits in escrow until the publishing rights were squared away. But if "there’s an attraction to do a movie," Paramount's lawyer says, things may get extra-complicated.
Fifty Shades of Grey author and reluctant Housewife Hero E.L. James has not one but two novels tucked away, according to USA Today. One is another erotic novel (though no word on whether it involves Christian Grey or the Red Room of Pain) and one is — wait for it — a paranormal young adult novel. The emoticon count in that one should be astronomical.
Here we are, eight days into May, and already the score is two-zero in favor of Death — which is more or less always the score, give or take several orders of magnitude. Four days ago, we lost Adam Yauch, one of the men behind the Beastie Boys. Today, we lost Maurice Sendak, who was, in his own way, also a man behind a lot of beastie boys. Max, Martin, Mickey, Pierre, and countless more, all of them running around in their naked, scowling, raging, rampaging, gleeful, gloating, havoc-wreaking (and, eventually, home-seeking) glory. Now they have become what, at least in the books, they always were: fatherless.
The brilliant and hauntingly mischievous works of Maurice Sendak, who died today at 83, are as universal a staple of early childhood as a pacifier or a tantrum. One of our great intergenerational commonalities is the sense memory of sitting either on a parent's lap or paging through the illustrations on a bedroom floor, both mesmerized and giddily unnerved by Sendak's naughty protagonists: the stubborn Pierre who took nonviolent protest to lengths to which we would not dare; or Max, whose rebellious trip to the land of the Wild Things (finally, a culture that understands kids' needs!) takes an unexpectedly traitorous turn (wait … they're gonna eat him up? This breaks the misbehavioralist contract!). Herewith, our tribute to a man who never patronized children with worlds with sanded-off corners or reductively callow lessons, a gift that will never be out of date.
Margaret Atwood is helping promote a new film called Payback, a documentary spawned from her 2008 collection of essays Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth — which, despite the title, is not the economic work it sounds like. Her definition of debt is more flexible, and includes moral debts and the acts of revenge that they might inspire. (Payback opens with a blood feud between two families). With her classic work The Handmaid's Tale, about a dystopian future in which women have no control over their reproductive rights, being cited by politicians during this campaign season and its influence on the recent blockbuster The Hunger Games, Vulture thought it high time to check in with the author, who was in town to kick off Payback's premiere at Film Forum.
"It's always nice to have people see the beauty of one's ideas."
Ian Somerhalder's got some competition for the role of Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of E.L. James's ridiculously successful S&M-tinged trilogy: True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård. He told Access Hollywood jokingly that he was "born to play" young billionaire Christian Grey. After all, he already has experience. "He’s got a sex chamber? My character has that on True Blood. He’s got his little dungeon," Skarsgård said (he plays the vampire Eric Northman). Since Fifty Shades started out as Twilight fan fiction, getting someone with some blood-sucking street cred seems integral to understanding the very complicated role of Christian Grey. For those of you still lamenting the death of proper literature in light of Fifty Shades' massive success, be prepared to gasp in horror yet again: For the second time in a month, the three books in the Fifty Shades trilogy are occupying the top three spots in the combined print and e-book New York Times best-seller list.
Lizz Winstead didn’t just create The Daily Show, serving as the show’s first head writer back in the Craig Kilborn era — she helped put both Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow on the map. She plucked Colbert from morning television (he was doing goofy little segments for Good Morning America), and she discovered Maddow on a morning radio show in Northampton, Massachusetts, then signed her for a political talk show co-hosted by Chuck D on Air America. This is all in Winstead’s new book, Lizz Free or Die, which shows how the Minneapolis native found her place as a feminist stand-up and political satirist in New York. (Watch the book trailer, below.) We talked to her about romance on the set of The Daily Show, what she thinks about Girls (everyone has an opinion), and wanting to be a priest.
Party Lines Slideshow: Benjamin Walker, Hugh Dancy, and More on Vibrators and Sex Shops
Susan Sarandon, Jason Segel, Ed Helms, and More at a Screening of Jeff Who Lives at Home
Judd Apatow, Kristen Wiig, Mandy Patinkin, and More at the Writers Guild Awards East
Party Lines Slideshow: Megan Hilty, Anjelica Huston, Katharine McPhee, and More at the Premiere of Smash
Party Lines Slideshow: Michael Fassbender, Viola Davis, George Clooney, and More at the National Board of Review Awards
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