Life of Pi to be filmed in 3-D

More details have emerged about director Ang Lee’s planned film adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and it looks like it will be shot in 3-D. From indieWIRE:

[Fox 2000 producer Elizabeth] Gabler and the filmmakers are lining up a big budget well north of $70 million for a 3-D magical fantasy adventure crammed with visual effects. There’s a shipwreck, the ship sinks, and a teenage boy is launched overboard and climbs into a life raft with a zebra, hyena, and a tiger. There are many CG animals (whales, fish, meercats) plus ocean and atmosphere. “It has a gigantic visual effects component,” says Gabler. “You can’t put a live tiger in a boat with a child. It has elements of Castaway, when the kid is alone in the boat. You don’t need language to convey what’s on the screen. We need to make the movie for the whole world.”

Hollywood producers don’t tend to invest $70 million in a movie without having some marquee names tied to it, and since the lead is a young Indian boy, should we anticipate Morgan Freeman and Ben Stiller and others as talking animals?

Daily book biz round-up: Danielle Steel bamboozled, Yann Martel lambasted, and more

Have some book news with your morning coffee:

• Danielle Steel needs to be more selective when hiring assistants
• London Book Fair attendance down by a third
• Yann Martel responds to critical thrashings
• Salon co-opted by Barnes & Noble Review
• OMG! Kindle to be sold at Target
• Amazon won’t retroactively fix errors in the e-books you buy from them
• For those of you unfamiliar with the lingo of fan fiction: meet Mary Sue

Daily book biz round-up, April 13

The sap that floweth from the news tree:

• Pulitzer Prizes announced
• Pulitzer-winner Tinkers is the first small press title to win the award since A Confederacy of Dunces
• Gawker on Jay McInerney’s debut as wine critic
• NY Times calls Yann Martel’s latest “offensive” and “perverse”
• Goldman Sachs sees bright sales future for e-books
• Stop the madness! Apparently, Google has tablet in the works

Daily book biz round-up, April 8

News for a quiet Thursday:

• Tom Clancy’s first novel in seven years sounds kinda like The A-Team
• E-book sales beat audiobook sales in 2009
• Simon & Schuster to publish George Carlin’s letters in 2011
• Yann Martel’s latest rates a big ol’ C+ from EW
• Kobo offering $9.99 Canadian bestsellers
  

Yann Martel takes a break from Stephen Harper book project

With his next novel coming out in April, Yann Martel has informed Stephen Harper, his unresponsive book club partner, that he will be taking a break from his biweekly book-sharing project.

Since 2007, Martel has sent Harper 76 book that have “been known to expand stillness.” Today, however, Martel sent the prime minister a book accompanied by a letter explaining that he will take a four-month break from the project to promote his new novel, Beatrice & Virgil. From Martel’s letter:

I’ve decided to invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey. I’m glad about the decision. This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you?

Martel also revealed that he recently received a handwritten thank you note from Barack Obama, who had just finished reading Martel’s Life of Pi with his daughter. The president wrote that it was “a lovely book – an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling.” Martel told Harper that he would frame the note “for sure,” and still takes it out sometimes to marvel at it:

What amazes me is the gratuity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him.

Eye Weekly launches new book club

When Oprah announced last November that she is calling it quits in 2011, publishers blessed by the mojo of the daytime television doyenne’s eponymous book club started biting their collective nails, wondering where they would get such valuable free publicity in the future.

While it likely won’t boast Oprahesque numbers, the Toronto-based alternative newspaper eye Weekly announced today that it is inaugurating a monthly book club, called Pop Fiction.

Each month, on Mondays, the club will debate a single title, with the book’s author taking part in the final week to respond to our praises, or our criticisms. Over the first few months of the year, expect visits from Canadian greats like Yann Martel and Andrew Kaufman as well as new voices on the international scene, like Eleanor Catton and Kathleen Winter.

(Quillblog is puzzled about the “international” nature of Newfoundland-based writer Winter, but never mind.)

The book club is hosted by author and eye Weekly book columnist Brian Joseph Davis, and features poet and Toronto bookstore staffer Kyle Buckley, blogger and Penguin Canada publicity assistant Bronwyn Kienapple, eye Weekly staff writer Chandler Levack, and editor of the National Post‘s Afterword blog Mark Medley.

The first book on the club’s agenda is Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau. Discussion of this title kicks off one week from today.

New Yann Martel novel to drop in April

Yann Martel’s highly anticipated follow-up to the Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi will drop in April, well ahead of the original release date in June. According to a press release from Martel’s Canadian publisher, Knopf Canada, Beatrice and Virgil will hit bookstores on April 6, a week before it goes on sale in the U.S. and several weeks before its U.K. pub date.

A spokesperson from Knopf told Quillblog the change will give Martel more time for an extensive book tour. In the release, Martel is quoted as saying, “A book is a part of speech, an element in an ongoing dialogue about life. I look forward to talking about Beatrice and Virgil with readers here in Canada and abroad.”

An allegorical tale about the Holocaust, Beatrice and Virgil is already generating controversy. In recent months, however, Martel has also been in the public eye for less contentious reasons: in September, one of his poems was read from outer space, and it was recently announced that Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee had signed on to helm the movie version of Life of Pi.

Yann Martel’s “shocking” new novel

Yann Martel’s follow-up to Life of Pi, titled Beatrice and Virgil and due in June 2010, is already generating controversy in the U.K., where Martel’s publisher, Canongate, has described the novel, an allegory about the Holocaust, as “shocking.”

From CBC News:

According to Jamie Byng, managing director and publisher of Canongate, “it will take us somewhere truly unexpected and shocking” and asks “profound moral and philosophical questions about the nature of love and evil.”

Despite the nine-year gap between Life of Pi and its successor, Martel has been keeping busy. In addition to the new novel, Martel wrote a 14-stanza original poem about water for Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté’s “poetic space mission,” broadcast from the International Space Station on Oct.9.

Martel has also been wondering what Stephen Harper is reading, and has published a book based on his attempts to get the Prime Minister to read literary works that encourage “stillness” — including Martel’s own.  

Ang Lee to adapt Life of Pi

According to The Bookseller, Yann Martel’s crazy popular Man Booker-winning Life of Pi is finally going before the cameras, courtesy of Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee.

Filmmakers such as M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) are among those who have expressed an interest in the story before.

Lee, whose credits include Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution, told [the website Digital Spy]: “I think I’m going to do Life of Pi… A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It’s a hard one to crack.”

The project is still at the scripting stage, and no casting has taken place yet.

Though Lee also directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he has never, to our knowledge, worked with an actual tiger before, so it’s hard to know if he’s the right man for the job. For our money, you couldn’t entrust the book to a surer bet than Caroll Ballard, who directed what is possibly the greatest boy-and-his-animal movie ever made, The Black Stallion. And just a few years ago, Ballard proved he could work wonders with big cats in the barely released Duma, about a boy and his cheetah.

Yann Martel sends Yann Martel to Stephen Harper

The first rule one learns in today’s publishing climate is that an opportunity to promote one’s own book should never, ever be passed up. Crank letter writer Renowned author Yann Martel demonstrates this truth with the 66th pick in his unilateral book club. This week, Martel is sending Stephen Harper … What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel.

The book’s accompanying letter is mostly a lot of musing about the wonderful thing that is a book, and how lasting. It’s fairly boilerplate book-thumping, with a few thoroughly Martelesque stylistic and ideological quirks. For example, he says that his book “will last because it will find protection in all the homes and libraries that shelter it,” suggesting that the tome is a kind of literary refugee. Martel also refers to Harper’s recent performance of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” as singing “poetry to the Canadian people.”

Interestingly, Martel notes that “eventually, there will be a complete edition” of WISHR? “When it comes out,” he writes, “how many letters it will contain – that all depends on [Harper].”