How to use this Page

The cover for The Girl in The Spider’s Web, the fourth installment of the bestselling Millennium series, has been unveiled by The Wall Street Journal.

Swedish writer David Lagercrantz picks up where the late Stieg Larsson left off. Deadline reports that Lagercrantz did not consult “the partial manuscript for a fourth book that the author’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, reportedly found in his computer.”

According to The Guardian, Quercus Books will publish the United Kingdom edition of this book on August 27th. Click here to watch the book trailer and see the cover art for this title. Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, won’t release the American version until September 1st. Follow this link to see the American publisher’s book trailer.

In the last two months, I’ve read three books with the word girl in the title. In December I read Gone Girl, in January I read The Girl on the Train and I just finished reading The Girl in the Photograph by Kate Riordan. I started to wonder if this was a recent trend in book titles, but […]

Swedish author Stieg Larsson may have passed away in 2004, but that hasn’t stopped his bestselling crime series from living on.

In fact, the Millennium crime trilogy is getting a new book this coming August. Author David Lagercrantz wrote the latest edition, That Which Does Not Kill.

The Guardian has more about the story:

The book will continue the story of the troubled but resourceful heroine Lisbeth Salander first made famous in Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But the author remained tight-lipped about the meaning of the title or what direction the action-packed political thriller – 500 pages long in Swedish – will take.

Tweet

Vertigo released Book 1 of its THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning posthumously published Millennium Series novels by Stieg Larsson in 2012 in hardback, begging the question: do we really need a graphic novel of a series so popular that the novels fly off the shelves and two film adaptations (both Swedish and American) have already been made? But it’s more a question of what the comics format has to offer to the concept that the film versions haven’t done or can’t do in quite the same way. The choices that filmmakers have made in adapting the series also leave a great deal of room for alternative formats to bring out elements of the books that have been neglected or understated.

[*Spoilers for Book 1 but not for Book 2 ahead]

Firstly, there’s the English-language title, which Vertigo maintains, though the original Swedish title is, of course, Men Who Hate Women. The graphic novel series, more than the American film version, and perhaps more than the Swedish film series, emphasizes this theme with great consistency. In Book 1 from Vertigo, the narrative chapters are interspersed with what takes the place of single-issue covers or splash-pages in the form of artfully presented statistics about crimes against women in Sweden. The figures are sobering, and sometimes shocking, making American readers wonder how these stats compare to the USA. It’s a grounding in non-fictional reality that keeps reigning the story back into the society it depicts, reminding readers that the plot elements of DRAGON TATTOO may not be as fanciful as your average murder-mystery. Within the narrative of Book 1, also, smaller elements of characterization, setting, and back-story reinforce this theme even more fully than either film version. There’s a tension in the graphic novel between this overarching theme, which could well be the primary “message” of the story, and the massive gravitational pull of the appealing character, now pop culture icon, Lisbeth Salander. She steals the show at every turn. Hailed as a “super hero for grownups” by Vogue Magazine, getting sucked into her story becomes an experience of this abuse, but it’s easy to get caught up in her remarkable abilities and achievements and allow her origins in violence and trauma to fall by the wayside.

Book 2 of DRAGON TATTOO (set to be released May 7th 2013) shows the same focus, laudably, as Larsson’s series itself, and shows no signs of letting up as an investigation of gender-based crimes. Book 2 continues to cover ground contained in the first volume of the Millennium Series of books, the American film version (2011) and the two part Swedish film version of the first book, tracing the arrival of Lisbeth on the island to help shamed journalist Mikael Blomkvist piece together clues in the disappearance of another possibly wronged woman, Harriet Vanger 40 years previously. The grisly murders they investigate after deciphering coded information in Harriet’s journal reinforce the ongoing theme of the societal prevalence of violence against women.

While all of the essential plot elements that deal with violence against Lisbeth (at the hands of her state-appointed guardian), and the murder cases she investigates are present in the film adaptations, Denise Mina, who adapts the graphic novels, and Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti, who handle the artwork, decompress the narrative enough to give equal focus to violence against women as to action sequences and romantic encounters. This changes the feel of the storytelling and alters the reader’s sense of what the story is really “about”. It is certainly a story about a hero, Lisbeth, and a crusader, Mikael Blomkvist, but it also a story about society, a story that is essentially “ugly”, as it was branded when it first reached American readers. To be fair, the Swedish film version comes closer to giving this theme more space to breathe than the American film version, but the graphic novel trumps them both in this regard.

The graphic novel has another ace up its sleeve in terms of format in comparison to film: readers can control their own narrative pacing. But Book 1 goes beyond that allowance by including visual detail and more minor linking scenes in both Lisbeth’s and Mikael’s life that can provide more of a sense of the world that they inhabit. Manco and Mutti do an excellent job of loading panels with atmospheric elements that go beyond the utilitarian basics of storytelling. The Venger mansion is a relic loaded to the rafters with remnants of a past way of life, a kind of gracious opulence that can quickly turn into a sinister reminder of even worse times for social injustice. Giullia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill’s colors on the graphic novel in Books 1 and 2 deserve special attention for contributing to this sense of differing social settings, from the more brash hues of Mikael’s life in the city, and later at the Venger mansion, to the more muted and moody world that Lisbeth inhabits. Brusco and Mulvihill’s wise decision to color code flashback sequences according to character works well, from Mikael’s sepia memories to Henrik Vanger’s blue-washed narratives of past events.

The tour de force, though, in colors, and also in lettering by Steve Wands, comes in Volume 2 when Lisbeth’s own flashbacks to recent traumatic events are depicted in a disjointed but overwhelming psychedelic repeat of phrases and images from her life, set in punk colors on a black background. Book 2 shows the same strengths as Book 1 in its unrushed pacing, attention to detail in setting, and also its commitment to establishing the psychology of its characters through preserving as much realistic minutiae as possible.

[Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film version]

Though Manco and Mutti’s artwork is fastidious throughout Books 1 and 2, it feels most confident when depicting Lisbeth. This may be because of Manco’s “dark and gritty” style, Volume 1 touts, established through working on comics such as HELLBLAZER, is given full reign. It provides the character with quite a wow factor, boosting the sense that she’s a form of superhero, since the art style that surrounds her often stands in contrast to the more staid (but nevertheless threatening) environments she moves through. She frequently seems to explode onto the scene, even when walking quietly, and is depicted in a heroic lower than eye-level perspective. Her qualities, suggested and emphasized by the artwork, are even more apparent once she reaches the Venger estate. It’s as if her personality, and visually the art-style surrounding her, disturbs and undermines the heavily ornamented, and static, world of the past. While this visual contrast is established in Book 1, it’s even more apparent, and even more effective in Book 2 because of changing environments.

[American film version poster]

Book 1 of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was promising, setting up a lot of potential for telling a story in a way distinct from film versions that have been made, and though Book 2 by nature doesn’t have the same introductory force of Book 1, it does form a remarkably seamless development on the best features of the earlier volume from emphasizing violence against women as a governing, haunting theme, to including more detail about the lives of its characters than film versions have allowed. Book 2 also preserves and enhances Lisbeth’s hero status visually and narratively while guiding the reader deeper into the mysteries surrounding Harriet Vanger’s disappearance. If the prevailing sense created by the same team in Book 1 is “this could all be real”, Book 2 explores the implications of that assumption and so has the potential to be even more disturbing and more compelling in its revelations. If readers want realism that comes closer to the original novels by Larsson than the film versions, the graphic novels provide that alternative while still capturing the larger than life elements of the characters that have made the story such a phenomenon in the first place.

 Title: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Book 2/Publisher: DC Vertigo/Creative Team: Adapted by Denise Mina, Art by Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti/Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill/Letters by Steve Wands

Hannah Means-Shannon writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress.

I just tore my office apart. I bought a new filing cabinet and three new sets of bookshelves. In the past I've been a book hoarder, keeping every single research book I ever used, as well as novels I hadn't read in 10 years and probably wouldn't reread for another 10. So I'm trying an [...]

Do negative reviews stop people from reading your books? Over at her blog, novelist Shiloh Walker disputed that claim in a passionate essay.

Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her work that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–counting the massive amount of one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Do negative reviews stop people from reading your books? Over at her blog, novelist Shiloh Walker disputed that claim in a passionate essay.

Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her work that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–counting the massive amount of one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Scottish novelist/playwright Denise Mina has been chosen to adapt the Millennium Trilogy into comics, it was revealed in The Scotsman. Known as a purveyor of “Tartan Noir,” Mina already has solid comics cred, having written a year’s worth of Hellblazer and A SICKNESS IN THE FAMILY for the Vertigo Crime line.

The GN adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful books, starring investigator/hacker Lisbeth Salander, were announced back in October — to be published by DC’s Vertigo imprint — but no further details have been released. The first book in the comics adaptation will be out in March — each novel will be split into two GNs for a total of six books.

Mina said she was “delighted” to have been chosen to refashion the books for a new audience. “There are going to be six graphic novels, two for each book. It will take two to three years and it just means I will be writing comics when I’m not writing novels.”

[snip] Mina is the author of nine novels with strong female characters, including Field of Blood, which was recently adapted into a television drama by the BBC, and she is also a bestseller in Sweden. She said she was a great admirer of the Larsson novels but planned to make the character of Salander tougher and less attractive.

The late author Larsson was apparently a comics readers, and one of his family members said he would have approved of the adaptation.

Larsson’s books have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. A Swedish film trilogy based on the books was an international hit; the US version, directed by David Fincher and starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, is due to open on December 21.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the musical team that created the moody soundtrack for The Social Network, have just released a six-song sampler from their upcoming soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Follow this link to download the sampler, containing six atmospheric songs for your writing pleasure–a glimpse of the three hour long final album. The David Fincher-directed adaptation of Stieg Larsson‘s mega-bestseller will hit theaters in mid-December.

Here’s more from Reznor, the leader of Nine Inch Nails: “For the last fourteen months Atticus and I have been hard at work … We laughed, we cried, we lost our minds and in the process made some of the most beautiful and disturbing music of our careers. The result is a sprawling three-hour opus that I am happy to announce is available for pre-order right now for as low as $11.99. The full release will be available in one week – December 9th.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Quercus saw an inevitable downturn in sales in the first half of 2011 after its Stieg Larsson enhanced 2010 numbers, but still managed to increase profit, improve its cash position, grow digital sales seven-fold and pay its first ever dividend to shareholders.

read more

Authors Janet Evanovich and Kathryn Stockett have each sold more than a million Kindle books, joining what Amazon has termed the “Kindle Million Club.”

The authors join the likes of Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins, Michael Connelly and John Locke, who have also passed the million mark in sales of their eBooks in the Kindle Store. According to the release, Stockett is the first debut novelist to reach this milestone.

Evanovich’s latest novel Smokin’ Seventeen has spent more than 100 days on the Kindle Best Seller list. Stockett’s novel, The Help, has been No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list and was just adapted into a film.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus), the first book in the late Swedish journalist's Millennium thriller trilogy, has become only the sixth adult novel to sell more than two million copies since records began.

read more

Dawn French’s début novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous (Penguin), retains its position at the summit of The Official UK Top 50 week-on-week, thanks to a promotional appearance on ITV’s “This Morning”, and a “£2.99 if you spend £10” deal at WH Smith.

read more

An apparently pirated copy of the trailer for David Fincher‘s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has materialized on YouTube. Above, we’ve embedded the shaky video.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the trailer features Trent Reznor and Karen O’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” in the background. We also see glimpses of Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander.

The trailer calls it “the feel bad movie of Christmas”–what do you think?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Jo Nesbo

Great article in The Washington Post on Jo Nesbo…and I love his bookshelves.

Apple is aiming to hook (iPad users while they’re young, with a new deal to sell the device at Toys ‘R’ Us stores) (Fast Company) - Tween social net Imbee (offers unlimited streaming radio, serving up acts including Black Eyed... Read the rest of this post

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, eight out of the top ten titles on college campuses are nonfiction books. Decision Points by George W. Bush topped the list.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson were the only fiction books on the list. Life by Keith Richards and The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 by Mark Twain joined Bush’s memoir on the list. Humor titles by Jon Stewart and Tucker Max also made the cut.

What titles did you read while you were in college? The magazine surveyed university bookstores across the country for the list. Follow this link for the complete list of participating bookstores.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tweet

As we journey farther into the New Year, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and building our readings lists for 2011. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Jeanne Munn Bracken (a former librarian and award-winning author) recommends you read Steig Larsson’s trilogy this year.

By Jeanne Munn Bracken

Move over, Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark. For the year 2010, the hottest buzz in popular literature was Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Released over the past couple of years, the three novels are available in a wide array of formats: hardcover and paperback books, e-books, audiobooks, and now in Swedish films with English subtitles. Millions of books in dozens of countries and languages have brought the late author immense fame and fortune, although he did not live to enjoy it.

The books’ popularity is based on two major factors: the novels are real page-turners, and Larsson’s own life story is intriguing.

First, the books. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an amateur sleuth mystery, as disgraced investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist travels from Stockholm to rural Sweden to find out what happened decades ago to Harriet Vanger, a teenager who disappeared from an island under “locked room” circumstances. Woven into the search is Blomkvist’s own story, involving journalistic misdeeds that result in a jail sentence.  Help arrives in the form of Lisbeth Salander, a damaged young woman in her 20s who balances her anti-social personality with consummate computer hacking skills.

After Blomkvist solves the Harriet Vanger conundrum, the subsequent books are more psychological thrillers on the noir side than classic mysteries. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander takes center stage as her back-story is slowly revealed against Blomkvist’s investigation of a sex-trafficking operation that results in the deaths of two of Blomkvist’s friends and colleagues; the murderer appears to be none other than Salender herself. The barely-believable finale pits Salander against her past and sets up The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which begins immediately after the conclusion of the second novel.   In the third novel, political intrigue and chicanery plays out as Salander is tried for the murders.

Larsson mixes in an interesting array of characters to love or hate: Blomkvist’s long-time married lover, a handful of sociopaths, some latter-day Nazis, government operatives, police, computer hackers, and a host of journalists. While the writing is hardly fine literature, the plot zings and fostered the reputation of books that, once started, must be finished at once. With sex, intrigue, violence, revenge, laugh-out-loud humor, and quite a bit of gore, the trilogy has been popular in all age groups among many nationalities.

Larsson’s writing style, while not great literature, combines compelling plots and characters. Since the pseudonymous translator Reg Keeland rendered the books into English in a very short time and was reportedly not able to approve the final edits, the stylistic blame, if there is any, might be his. Still, “Keeland” (really

USA Today released its “Top 100 Books for 2010″ list this week, a bestseller list composed of 77 percent fiction. Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium series dominated the top three spots and George W. Bush‘s Decision Points occupied fourth place.

The newspaper also noted: “Stephenie Meyer‘s popularity began to cool off. She accounted for 4% of best sellers the list tracked, down from 11% in 2009. The vampire and paranormal craze among readers isn’t dead, but it’s fading, accounting for just 9% of best sellers, down from 17% in 2009.”

The article also noted that books with movie adaptations do particularly well. It’ll be interesting to see if adaptations (like Kathryn Stockett‘s The Help) will boost sales next year.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Actress Rooney Mara, star of David Fincher‘s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, graced the cover of W magazine’s February 2011 issue wearing her Lisbeth Salander gear. The eight-page article revealed some major changes in the upcoming film.

Here’s more from the article: “The script, which captures the novel’s bleak tone (its original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women), was written by Academy Award winner Steven Zaillian, who wrote Schindler’s List, and it departs rather dramatically from the book. Blomkvist is less promiscuous, Salander is more aggressive, and, most notably, the ending—the resolution of the drama—has been completely changed.”

The article also outlined how Mara prepared for the role, training in motorcycle riding and kickboxing. While the body piercings are real, her back tattoo is temporary and features a M.C. Escher dragon.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ever feel like you’re being watched on public transportation? Maybe you’ve been spotted by The Book Spy.

This anonymous New York City blogger explained in a post: “Every day, I spend nearly two hours in a dank, dark box hurtling through tunnels under the ground. It is my curse, but also my blessing. In the subway I’m exposed to a culture of readers unequaled elsewhere. They flip through magazines, shuffle through print-outs, and contort their newspapers into elaborate origami folds to keep the pages from encroaching upon their neighbors. Above all they read books. Books of every shape, size, genre, and format.”

Descriptions include book title, author, MTA subway line, and a description of the reader. Some recent books spotted: The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and the Bible.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In October, film critic Christopher Smith (pictured) self-published the thriller, Fifth Avenue. When his book cracked Amazon’s top 10 bestseller list, he faced homophobic insults and death threats in a now-deleted post on an Amazon.com discussion board.

We caught up with Smith to talk about the controversy. Our interview follows below…

Q: Did you expect to deal with controversy when you put Fifth Avenue out there?

A: I did ask friends about a few specific scenes in the book and wondered if I should censor myself from telling the truth in those scenes. I don’t believe in censorship, so I decided not to self-censor, especially after reading Stieg Larsson‘s books, which can be brutal.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.