Bret Easton Ellis is taunting Twitter readers with threats of adapting “mommy porn” series Fifty Shades of Gray into a film, and is using the microblogging service to speculate about cast and crew. "I think David Cronenberg is a great idea for directing Fifty Shades of Gray and we worked together on American Psycho in its initial phase," Ellis tweeted. "I'm putting myself out there to write the movie adaptation—This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters."
British art publisher Phaidon Press is for sale, owner Richard Schlagman has announced. Despite revenue increasing by 17 percent last year, Schlagman said he’s seeking an owner who wants to “to lead its transition from print to digital.”
Also in the UK, Sainsbury’s, Britain’s third largest supermarket chain, has bought a sixty-four percent stock in Anobil, a social networking site for readers—a move that Moby Lives speculates could mean that the company is setting itself up to compete with Amazon. Though Anobii is relatively unknown at the moment, it’s “similar to Goodreads,” and has 600,000 international users and 60,000 e-books.
Telephone Press founder Paul Legault has “translated” 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson into what he calls “basic English,” and some of the results are available online.
On the occasion of last weekend’s LOOK3 photo festival in Charlottesville, Virginia, Geoff Dyer engaged in an “illustrated conversation” with photographer Alex Webb.
What do digital publishing outfits Byliner and The Atavist suggest about the the state of longform journalism? Smithsonian magazine investigates.
Penguin Press has announced that Thomas Pynchon’s full back catalog will soon be available in ebook form.
The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman has announced the winners of his literary/corporate mashup contest. After considering “Remembrance of Things Pabst,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips Ahoy,” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good & Plenty,” Greenman and his crew of judges settled on “Bayerwulf.” The challenge was inspired by the discovery that a version of War and Peace in the Barnes and Noble’s e-bookstore had replaced every instance of the word “kindle” with “nook.”
