As you would expect, there has been much more written and unearthed about Barry Hannah since our first note about his passing on Monday. Here are a few highlights: The Paris Review has posted a full PDF of their 2004 interview with Hannah. A favorite exchange: INTERVIEWER What was wrong with the third-person voice? HANNAH In my case, a third person just led to too much wisdom I hadn’t earned. …  Read More →

The first look I've seen at Daniel Clowes's upcoming Wilson is in the Comics Reporter , not, alas, here (send copies please, D&Q!), but that won't stop me from passing it along to you. I'm sure there must be a few of you out there who are as rabid Clowes-anticipators as Alex and me. Not sure how much of the review you'll want to read, but from what I can tell it seems to tastefully skirt any spoilers. By “from... 

Just got a note from an Omni reader, Chris Moorman, who had a question I couldn't answer. Can anyone out there in Omniland help? I just watched the movie Sunshine and it reminded me of an old short story that goes something like this…..The sun was dying and the earth was frozen solid and humanity had retreated underground. A plan was devised and a mission was sent to 'relight' the sun. This was going to be accomplished by dropping... 

As part of the buildup for this year's Tournament of Books , C. Max Magee at The Millions does something I've been meaning to do for a long time: compare U.S. and U.K. covers for some of last year's big fiction. I wanted to especially because of the strikingly different covers out there for two of our favorites, Let …  Read More →

One of the most fascinating anthologies coming out in the next couple of months is Dark Faith , edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon. A plethora of amazing writers–including Lavie Tidhar, Ekaterina Sedia, Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Kelly Barnhill, Richard Wright, and Chesya Burke– have contributed to this book, which comes to readers from Apex,  Read More →

This just in: the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has released the 2010 finalists for its annual cookbook award. They've taken a different approach to the announcement this year, launching the list initially via their website's Amazon store , with no category distinctions yet, so stay tuned for further updates. In the meantime, we're very glad to see that some of  Read More →

As noted on Monday, Mark Teppo is an interesting new author whose  Read More →

Want to see who's behind the most famous apple-holding hands since Snow White ? Slate's The Big Money has put together a slide show of the faces behind some of advertising's most famous hands, and among them is Kimbra Hickey, who posed for the cover of Twilight in 2004, little realizing it would later make her a Twi-con draw in her own right. (You can also see who owns those well-buffed nails you always see holding a Kindle .) –Tom... 

Word quickly spread this afternoon that Barry Hannah died today of “natural causes” at the age of 67 in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was the chair of the writing department at Ole Miss and where the 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book , already dedicated to him this year, is to begin on Thursday. Hannah was a titan many have not heard about, undeniably tied to the South and to what people who really like writing call “the... 

Mark Teppo is an interesting new author whose  Read More →

On April 13, over seven years after he came out of nowhere to win the Booker Prize for what has remained one of the most popular novels of the last decade, Life of Pi , Yann Martel will release his next novel, Beatrice and Virgil . In the meantime, he's put his plans for the new novel through many versions (which you can get a hint of from what seems a very autobiographical opening to the new book, which tells the story of how a bestselling... 

Heidi Broadhead doesn't do all her good blogging for us : she's also the ” Arts Nerd ” over at our local politics/culture/etc. blog, Publicola , and yesterday she posted an excellent interview with David Shields (also local) about his new literary “manifesto,” Reality Hunger . The book has often been seen as an argument against fiction (which it is in some ways) but here's a section from the interview that... 

Rejoice, Hellboy fans: On March 17, Mike Mignola will finally provide the truth behind his titular character's heritage with Hellboy: The Wild Hunt . It's a storyline that's been cryptically brewing for years, and it must be terrifying and liberating for Mr. Mignola to finally reveal his grand scheme. I started Dark Horse's latest collection without any knowledge of the answers laid bare within its fiery-tinged pages, but then... 

You need never ask a novelist “Do you have any advice for young writers?” at a reading again: thanks to the Guardian , you have all the answers you could possibly choose from. In honor of Elmore Leonard's now-legendary 10 Rules of Writing , which is about to come out as a book in the UK, they asked 28 fiction writers to list their professional pointers (see part one and part two ). There's a lot of agreement over doubtless the... 

What's in a logo? With MIT Press, apparently more than I realized. Scorsese's new flick, Shutter Island , put me in the mood to browse one of last year's creepier books, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals –published by MIT and written up in this space in October of last year. Now, I've seen the MIT colophon thousands of times over…  Read More →