On April 19th at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Pittsburgh, the annual Mr. Romance competition will take place. The hottest cover models will strut their stuff and attendees vote on their favorite. This year, you can weigh in even if you won’t be going to the convention. That’s right, this year there will be a Cyber Choice Award.
Here are two of the contestants: on the left is
Chris Howell. Chris is 5′10, a Cancer and hails from Houston, Texas. He enjoys
“Food, Dancing, Fast Cars, and Fun People.” On the right is John Fish, also of Houston, Texas. Chris is 6′3 and is a Scorpio. We don’t know what John enjoys, because clearly he didn’t fill out his profile card completely. But we’re guessing he enjoys: weightlifting, tattoos, cowboy hats and barbeque. (Hey, he’s from Houston, he has to like barbeque).
There are six other contestants you can see and vote for here. We’re voting for Chris Howell because he looks like a sexy, brooding vampire.
Posted in romance
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
Bantam Books © 2007, 338 pages
Cynthia Bigge woke up one day when she was fourteen years old to find her mother, father, and brother gone. No note. No sign of struggle. No explanation. The police investigation into their disappearance was inconclusive. Cynthia wound up living with an aunt, her mother’s sister, and managed somehow to get on with her life. Twenty-five years later, Cynthia is still haunted by what happened, and when a crime-stopper program runs a segment on the cold case, she finds herself thinking about her family’s disappearance more than ever. Were they in fact all killed that night? Are they still alive? Did they choose, inexplicably, to abandon her? We watch Cynthia struggle with her past thcoarse the eyes of her husband, high school teacher Terry Archer. Since we’re not privy to Cynthia’s unexpressed thoughts we, like Terry, cannot know for sure whether she’s losing her grip on reality–or if something more sinister is going on–when she tells him, for example, that a car has been following her and their eight-year-old daughter, or when she claims to have received a menacing phone call when alone in the house.
[INSET TEXT: This is not a story that scares with gore and firepower, yet it’s one of the most frightening and suspenseful books I can recollect reading.] Linwood Barclay does a good job of sowing doubts about Cynthia’s sanity–and about her culpability in her family’s disappearance–but she’s not the only one readers have to worry about. For most of Barclay’s book we don’t know whom to trust. This is not a story that scares with gore and firepower, yet it’s one of the most frightening and suspenseful books I can recollect reading. In part this may be a function of the ostensible ordinariness of the characters’ lives. They’re not secret agents or gun runners or private eyes, just middle-class suburbanites. And Cynthia didn’t wake up that morning to a bloodbath, something outside of the average experience, but to an empty house–which is far more readily imagined and thus more truly frightening. Barclay also has a delicious way of of casually injecting into otherwise mundane scenes small but heart-stoppingly chilling details.
In short, Barclay’s thriller is the sort of book you stay up late reading–I speak from experience–both because you don’t want to halt and because the prospect of turning off the light doesn’t bear contemplating. It would make a awesome movie.
Tags: book reviews, books, Linwood Barclay, No Time For Goodbye
Original post by Debra Hamel
Viz Media is teaming up
with Stan Lee to launch a new manga series.
Stan Lee and his entertainment company Pow! (Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment will collaborate with Japanese manga creator Hiroyuki Takei (creator of Shaman King) on a new manga series for Japanese audiences. The series, entitled Ultimo (Karakuridoji Ultimo in Japanese), will premier later this month in Jump SQ. II, a special editon of Jump SQ, a monthly manga magazine published by Shueisha, one of Viz”s Media parent companies and the publisher of Weekly Shonen Jump magazine.
Marc Weidenbaum, editor-in-chief of the U.S. edition of Shonen Jump, will release details about the project in a press conference during New York Comic-con later this month. “I really can’t say much now,” Wiedenbaum told PWCW in an interview yesterday, “except that it’s coming out, it’s historic, and we’re excited.” Asked whether Ultimo would appear in the U.S. edition of Shonen Jump, Weidenbaum said that Viz is excited about the Japanese edition and is focused getting the word out about the collaboration.
Stan Lee is amazing. Does he ever sleep?
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
British pop star Lily Allen has withdrawn
as a judge of the Orange Broadband Prize for Literature. The literati is thrilled, because they never thought a pop star should be judging literature anyway.
Lily Allen was never the most obvious pick to judge a major literary prize. She’s famous not for her views on novels but for a song about London that doesn’t even spell out the city’s entire name.
That didn’t halt the organisers of the Orange Broadband prize (awarded for the best novel in English by a woman). In December, they added Allen’s name to a judging panel alongside broadcaster Kirsty Lang, journalist Bel Mooney, novelist Philippa Gregory and the Guardian’s Lisa Allardice.
Lily Allen was never the most obvious pick to judge a major literary prize. She’s famous not for her views on novels but for a song about London that doesn’t even spell out the city’s entire name.
That didn’t halt the organisers of the Orange Broadband prize (awarded for the best novel in English by a woman). In December, they added Allen’s name to a judging panel alongside broadcaster Kirsty Lang, journalist Bel Mooney, novelist Philippa Gregory and the Guardian’s Lisa Allardice.
Many lit snobs squawked, wondering what a 22-year-old pop singer would bring to the table — other than chewing gum and photographers’ flash-bulbs. And now, well, they can halt squawking. Because Lily Allen’s out.
“It is with deep regret that Lily Allen has withdrawn from the judging panel,” Allen’s manager told the Daily Mail this weekend. “Lily had read extensively for the first stage of the judging process and was looking forward to the shortlist meeting but recently found that she was unable to commit 100% to the role due to ill-health.”
Allen did not attend a judges’ meeting last month to discuss the 20-book longlist, according to the Daily Mail. Instead she participated by telephone. Allen also missed a debate last week to decide the shortlist.
“Lily hopes that her withdrawal will not detract from the enormous importance of the Orange prize and sends her sincere apologies to her fellow judges and to the individual authors,” her manager added.
We hope Lily is feeling better. But really, what in the world was she doing on the judging panel to begin with>
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
