Word: novels
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...early--and best--passages, writer- director Liev Schreiber's film, adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, is more comically daring than such a tale has any right to be. Jonathan--always dressed in a dark suit and tie, peering at the world through thick glasses and expecting to find vegetarian cuisine in the depths of a country where sausage appears to be the national dish--is not entirely prepared for the ministrations of his tour guides. They operate a grandly named organization called Heritage Tours, which consists of a dubious car and eccentric employees: Alex (Eugene Hutz), who says...
...Beautiful as Fiction Most writers are happy to achieve success in a single format, but such a career would bore gifted polymath Vikram Seth. The Indian-born author has already delighted readers with poetry, translations of Chinese verse, a book of travels through Tibet, a libretto and the monumental novel A Suitable Boy. This fall, Seth releases his latest foray into a new genre: a memoir titled Two Lives, which tells the true story of how his Indian granduncle Shanti fell in love with and married a Jewish-German woman after World War II. The book will weave together history...
...Only connect the prose and the passion," wrote British novelist E.M. Forster, "and both will be exalted." Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, does, and they are. Beautifully written, it is - like her debut best seller White Teeth - essentially a story about families, expansive enough to encompass questions of race, Rembrandt, aging gracefully (or not), love, fidelity and, as the title suggests, recognizing what is truly beautiful and how we make it a part of our lives. Smith, as she makes clear in her acknowledgments, is indebted to Forster for more than good advice. On Beauty is a rambunctious...
That hallucination will be playing on a dozen American movie screens this weekend as Thumbsucker, the independent movie based on my novel. Like most writers, I had always dreamed of having one of my books made into a film, but I had never expected that it would be the one about my most tender adolescent secret: the oral fixation that I tried to hide from others until I was old enough to go to college and that, when I briefly managed to break it, was replaced by a host of more troubling obsessions (some of them involving illegal substances). Writing...
When a book becomes a movie, the novelist goes from author to spectator--always a bewildering transition, even more so when the book in question is based on his life. For me the process began about four years ago, three years after the novel's publication, when writer-director Mike Mills invited me to his house in California to discuss his adaptation of the book. He had shortened the time span of the narrative, combined several young female characters into one and focused on the protagonist's complex relationship with his unhappy mother. He had improved my work, in other...