The Open Page: Book & Print News – 2/18/08

1) Tor Books U.S. has a new promotional campaign called Watch the Skies. Readers can sign up for the program and receive a free PDF ebook to download a week from major Tor SFF authors and a newsletter. U.S. residents who sign up before May 15^th are also registered for a prize drawing. For more information, visit: http://www.tor.com/

2) SFF author Emma Bull has started up a collaborative Web fiction project, Shadow Unit. The idea was to invent a sci-fi television show that never actually existed, complete with fan fiction for it. Bull and her husband, author Will Shetterly, wrote a series “bible” for the imaginary show and then Bull recruited other major writers such as Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette to help build the web site and provide content. Shadow Unit contains episode stories for each “season” of the show, character backstories, artwork and secret links to additional material. The finale of the show will be a novel that will appear in serial form later this year.

3) Thomas Nelson Publishers has made a five book deal with author Mark Olsen for a series retelling the legend of the three Christian Magi. The first book in the series, Magi, is due for release in January 2009.

4) Megan Crewe has sold a YA fantasy novel, Giving Up the Ghost, to Holt. The novel tells the story of a teen outcast who sees ghosts and uses the secrets they reveal to expose her fellow students’ deceits.

5) Michael Chabon’s bestselling SF novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, has been acquired for film by Columbia Pictures. The brotherly team of Joel and Ethan Coen will be writing and directing the movie adaptation and co-producing it with Scott Rudin. The three most recently worked together to do the Oscar nominated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Rudin also has been the producer of other Chabon adaptations – Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas, and the up-coming adaptation of Chabon’s Pulitizer Prize-winning magic realism tale of comics history, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon offers an alternate history post-World War II, in which Jewish settlers were placed in their own colony in Alaska.

6) Robert V.S. Redick’s debut trilogy, starting with The Red Wolf Conspiracy, which has been earning buzz in the UK from Gollancz/Orion, will be released in the U.S. by Del Rey.

7) Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends are Superheroes, about an ordinary man married to a superpowered woman, has been optioned for film to Straight Edge Films.

8) New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter has optioned her novel Red Handed to Sony Pictures Television with Dan Wigutow Productions.


2007 Bram Stoker Award Nominees:

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