Results tagged “bookreview”

Our friends at Philly publishing house Quirk Books recently put out a new book called Gig Posters Volume 1: Rock Show Art of the 21st Century. It's a huge collection (the dimensions are about 14 x 11 x 1) of over 700 posters from the archives of GigPosters.com, selected by the website's creator and proprietor, Clay Hayes, who also provides a short introduction. The posters are organized by the artists that created them (if you'd like to see all the posters for a particular band, you can check the index in the back), with each artist represented by a full-page, tear-off poster (each page is perforated for easy removal) that has on its opposite side six more, smaller examples of the artist's work, plus plenty of data on all the posters and the artist, including website, influences, preferred medium/method, and some random remarks from the artist. So yes, the claim that the book has "over 700 posters" is slightly misleading, as there are only 101 full-size posters, but the quality of the art and of the reproductions is so high that you could tear out any or all of those 101 posters, frame them, put them right on your wall, and not feel the least bit embarrassed (well, unless you selected one of the posters that features full frontal nudity; that might be a bit embarrassing if your Mom comes over).

I mentioned Jeff Burk's parody novel Shatnerquake in a Whiz of the Web column a few weeks back. I thought the concept (not to mention the cover) was pretty brilliant, so I jumped at the chance to read and review the book when it was offered to me. The novel is set in the near future, when both technology and fandom have advanced to rather extreme degrees. There now exists a sect of rabid fans of Bruce Campbell, known as Campbellians, who cut off their right hands in remembrance of one of Campbell's more famous characters. Also, something called the Network Wars led to the development of a weapon called a Fiction Bomb which can erase a piece of entertainment from reality, so no one remembers it ever existed. The Campbellians do not like William Shatner, so when the first ever ShatnerCon is organized, and includes screenings of all of Shatner's movie and television appearances, they see their chance to strike. They plant a Fiction Bomb in the theater and wait for Shatner to be erased from history. But the bomb goes haywire, and instead of Shatner's fictional characters being destroyed utterly, they're somehow given life—pushed out of fiction and into reality. Trapped now in a world where they know they don't belong, and where they're all merely copies of someone else, they become filled with rage and, in a desire for vengeance, decide to hunt down their originator—William Shatner himself—and destroy him.

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in Whiz a while back, and the publisher of the book, a Philadelphia company called Quirk Books, was good enough to send me an early review copy. Unfortunately, just as the book arrived in the mail, the Philadelphia Film Festival was starting, so I didn't have time to read it until recently. The book has since been officially released, and been purchased in large numbers; it quickly became a New York Times Best Seller, and is currently sold out on Amazon and on the Quirk Books website. Zombies are definitely popular these days! Also, the book is rather unique. It's not a complete reimagining of Jane Austen's classic romance novel Pride and Prejudice; it is Pride and Prejudice, just with zombies added.

If you're picking up a copy of Inquirer columnist Faye Flam's first book, The Score (subtitled "How the Quest for Sex Has Shaped the Modern Man") looking for a titillating chronicle of men's sex lives, look elsewhere. Likewise, if you're looking for groundbreaking scientific research explaining why, for instance, guys like porn, you've picked up the wrong book. Flam is a journalist, pure and simple, so she's neither trying to arouse nor to astound. What she is doing—what she does quite well—is reporting, educating, and informing.

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” From the first sentence, Beckett’s youngest and funniest novel, Murphy, proves to be so quintessentially Beckett that, as a friend aptly analogized over coffee one day this week: “It’s as if that sentence were Beckett’s body diced, dipped in bourbon, cured and later left to brew in hot water until some old expert could declare it, a perfect cup of something Beckett.”