Today marks the release of Ben Marcus’s long-awaited fourth novel, The Flame Alphabet, in which language becomes lethal, estranging families, turning children (who are solely immune) into something resembling packs of wild dogs, and requiring everyone’s complicity in a sort of social apocalypse brought on by an inability to communicate. Needless to say, the concept that language may turn toxic and slowly kill off its users is relatively terrifying for us, so we’ve put together a short guide on the most frightening fictional afflictions in literature — and more importantly, how to avoid them. Click through for a quick survival lesson, and let us know if you have any more safety tips in the comments.

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Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce will be filming an updated version of mind power maven Carrie — and this remake promises to be closer to Stephen King’s 1974 novel. Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa — who was recently hired to help out the jinxed (and extremely dangerous!) production will pen the script. Apart from being a faithful retelling of King’s tale about a mousy high schooler who eventually uses her telekinetic powers to lash out at everyone around her, Slash Film reports that the project will be “more grounded than the Brian De Palma-directed film.”

Sissy Spacek is synonymous with the role of Carrie, which is a part that hasn’t fared well for other actresses stepping into her blood-soaked prom dress. Angela Bettis’ take on the teen in the TV remake of the movie was met with negative reviews, and the same goes for awful The Rage: Carrie 2. Broadway’s biggest flop (losing a whopping $8 million bucks) was a huge embarrassment in 1988, but Carrie will apparently be returning to the stage again later this month. Is there room for more of the wronged prom princess? More importantly, why won’t anyone listen to King, who recently said he wanted to see David Cronenberg or David Lynch at the helm? Huge missed opportunity.

NaNoWriMo may be over and our schedules may be filling up with holiday parties and family visits, but despite all that, December is one of our favorite months to curl up and read. If you need a little extra inspiration in this most hectic of months, however, never fear. To spur you on, we’ve collected a few inspiring quotes about reading by some people who read quite a lot — the authors themselves. Click through to read forty of our favorite quotes from writers about books and reading, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your own favorite inspirational declarations in the comments! Read More »

1. Old Ideas, the lovely Leonard Cohen’s first studio album in seven years, isn’t due out until January, but you can already stream one of the tracks called “Show Me The Place” here.

2. Julie Delpy has signed on to direct The Right Profile, a biopic about Clash frontman Joe Strummer that will focus on his later years, which were spent largely outside of the spotlight. [via CinemaBlend]

3. Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, James Frey, and Chris Adrian are among the authors on the shortlist for the 19th annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which is organized by the Literary Review. The lucky winner will be announced at a ceremony on December 6. [via Telegraph]

4. According to a new study in the UK, more successful male artists have more sexual partners than less successful artists. Oddly, the researchers’ findings did not hold true for female artists. [via Guardian]

5. While discussing last weekend’s pepper spray incident at UC Davis with Bill O’Reilly, Fox News host Megyn Kelly felt the need to point out that it is “a food product, essentially.” Meanwhile O’Reilly says, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” [via Gawker]

Bonus Buzz: Zoidberg Reimagined

Yesterday, Stephen King’s newest work, 11/22/63, a novel about a man who travels back in time via a storeroom to stop the JFK assassination, hit shelves. Inspired by this newest addition to the time travel literature genre, we got to thinking about a few of our favorite time travel stories, and particularly about all of the different ways those fictional mortals manage to thrust themselves back and forth in space-time. From our vantage, there are a few types of time travel that we see used over and over again: mechanical (time machines and the like), portal-based (stepping through some sort of floating hole in the space-time continuum), fantastical (ghosts or other unbelievable phenomena), magical/item-based (some sort of artifact that holds the power of time travel), and the simply unexplained (because why does it matter? Get to the cool future stuff already). There are hundreds of novels and short stories about or involving time travel, so these are a few of our favorites, plucked both from the beginnings of the genre and from contemporary literature. Click through to read our list, and let us know your own favorite time travel novels — or time travel methods — in the comments. Read More »

Yesterday marked the kickoff of National Novel-Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), the online project that challenges participants to write a 50,000-word book in the 30 days of November. To those scribbling hurriedly to meet its deadline, we wish you a book deal by December. And to cheer you on, we’ve rounded up a treasure trove of advice and encouragement from the great writers who best embody, in their own work, NaNoWriMo’s goals of writing much and writing fast. Below the jump, read through our favorite words from the wise, speedy, and prolific.

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It’s the first of the month, and you know what that means: a brand new spate of new literary releases to delve into. Not that we mind — the weather’s getting brisker (not to mention those snowstorms, NYC), and we really can’t think of anything better to do than to curl up with a cup of hot cider and a great novel (or memoir, or book of essays, or short story collection). Don’t be put off by the number of big names on our list this month — we like a struggling first novel as much as the next blog, but November is the month for publishers to pull out their big guns, and boy have they ever. Click through to see our list of ten must-reads coming out this month, and let us know which books you’re most psyched to dig into in the comments.

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It’s nearly Halloween, which means that fictional bad guys will be out in the streets in full force from now until Monday (and likely even longer). If you’re not sure who’s who among the villainous greats, we’ve got you covered: Kim Newman, whose newest novel Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D’Ubervilles hit stands this month, is pretty much the authority on literary villains. As Newman explains, “To be a great villain, it’s not enough just to be thoroughly evil – you have to be entertaining with it.  A certain panache helps, especially for villains who fall into the category of arch-nemesis and have to prove themselves almost the equal of a flamboyantly brilliant hero.  Colossal schemes are also useful, to differentiate them from low-rent thugs like Fagin and Bill Sikes, and an unusual physical appearance, fondness for novelty pets, an impressive lair and sheer persistence do help.  Unusual psychological conditions are also recommended, but they need to be wedded to real malevolence for the proper chill.”

“I include one vampire – how could you leave Dracula off the list? – but have confined myself to roughly human beings, so Wells’ Martians or Lovecraft’s Cthulhu don’t get in.” Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. Click through to see Newman’s list of the best villains in literature, and then be sure to check out Professor Moriarty for more delightful, smoldering evil.

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We’ve made occasional mention of our love for the Fake Criterons tumblr, in which the striking graphics, clever designs, and isolated imagery of that preeminent cinephile line is applied to films that are, for the most part, entirely undeserving of inclusion among that “continuing series of important classic and contemporary films.” But that site has gone above and beyond this month, with their “Faked from the Dead” series, comprised entirely of fake Criterions for 1980s-era horror movies (From their challenge: “Summer camps, creepy basements, old caretakers, guys with improbable masks, dime store psychologists, abandoned insane asylums, broken down cars in the middle of nowhere- all of it”). Their many contributors risen to the occasion, and have created dozens of sharp, funny, and downright ridiculous covers. After the jump, we’ve selected a few of our faves.

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If you’ve been following along, then you know there has been no shortage of drama concerning Ron Howard’s planned adaptation of Stephen King’s genre-bending series, The Dark Tower. First, the epic project — which is meant to encompass a total of three movies and two interlocking television seasons — was unceremoniously dumped by Universal over the summer due to its unwieldy nature and hefty price tag. Plenty of people assumed that like many ambitious book-to-film adaptations that came before it, the project would never see the light of day. Now, producer Brian Grazer reports that he and Howard have managed to shave off $45 to 50 million from the budget of the first film, and that HBO has signed-on to air the TV portion of their massive undertaking — presumably with Javier Bardem still set to star as gunslinger Roland Deschain.

Given the success that the network has had with Game of Thrones, The Dark Tower landing at HBO isn’t all that surprising, but we are curious as to whether it will help secure a studio for the film releases. We’re also wondering if this will effect how the project eventually rolls out. Perhaps starting things off on the small-screen to help build a larger, mainstream audience wouldn’t be such a bad idea — especially if it was done intentionally! [via MTV Movies Blog]