Though the new “Special Illustrated Edition” of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi isn’t due out from Knopf Canada until November 17, the Guardian has put together a short slide show of Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac’s full-colour oil-paintings. You can see them here.

For the most part, the images are fairly literal-seeming representations of events from the book, which is fine, but they’re maybe a little too reminiscent of those illustrated children’s bibles a lot of us grew up with. Come to think of it, the illustrations actually make the book look kind of like a kid’s book. Maybe that’s the intention, though, who knows?

If you’ve been reading Variety lately, you’re probably aware that there’s a massive strike looming in Hollywood, and that everybody there is panicking about it. It sounds like a doomsday scenario: three different unions – the Writer’s Guild of America, the Director’s Guild of America, and the Screen Actor’s Guild – may band together next June, co-ordinate walk-outs, and effectively cripple the entire movie industry.

Fearing the worst, the movie companies are now fast-tracking as many films as possible, in the hopes of completing them before the strike. The industry website Cinematical has posted a list of all the priority projects, and one that caught our eye was the 20th Century Fox adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Last we heard, the film was to be directed by current Hollywood pariah M. Night Shyamalan, but now, it seems, the reins have been handed over to French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Amelie fame. According to the IMDB movie page, the film is currently in “pre-production,” which means either that it’s almost ready to begin shooting, or that Jeunet simply made a promise over drinks to read the book. We’ll keep you posted.

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. After yesterday’s shortlist announcement, however, they’re positively hornswoggled. The most disturbing element of the list, according to The Telegraph, is that all but one of the authors – Ian McEwan – are practically unheard of, and that a full four of them have sold less than a thousand copies of their books.

While McEwan’s novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal’s People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in [the U.K.] by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright’s The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan’s rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it.