For this list, we didn’t just want book adaptations that were a critical/audience failure or a box office failure–we wanted both. That’s why the films you see below might not be the biggest money losers or the most panned; instead, they’re a combination of the most hated and most wasteful uses of celluloid out there. If none of these movies were made, over $913,000,000 would have been saved and approximately 4 billion viewing hours would have been saved.

(The following films were either critical or money failures, but not both, so they couldn’t make the list: The Great Gatsby [the Redford one], Lolita [1997], Treasure Planet, Beloved, The House of the Spirits, many more)

10. John Carter (2012)

Net Losses (inflation adjusted to 2012): $67,221,900

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%

Representative Review Quote: “There’s nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.” -San Francisco Chronicle

Everyone was excited to call John Carter a flop before it even came out in 2012, and though it did tank, it lost less money than some of the other films on this list and it actually received so-so reviews. It’s hard to justify the $250 million dollar budget, and while it was trying to capture the same adventure feel of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it ended up being compared to the worst aspects of Prince of Persia, The Phantom Menace, and Cowboys & Aliens. Yeah, I forgot about Cowboys & Aliens, too.

9. Atlas Shrugged: Part I, II (and probably) III (2011-2014)

Net Losses (first two parts combined, not adjusted): $22,036,572

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 11% (Part I); 5% (Part II)

Representative Review Quote: “A disaster as a film, Atlas also is laughable in its presentation of Rand’s ideology.” -Philadelphia Inquirer

Have you seen the poster? The trailer? Continue reading →

Mr. Murakami is not pleased, Swedish Academy.

PWxyz doesn’t have time for non-nerdy quizzes; there are too many of those. Instead, here’s one of the more blistering tests this side of the Badwater Ultramarathon–guess the Nobel winner by citation. The format is much like a non-demanding English course–everyone’s favorite: multiple choice! In an attempt to make it less trying, we’ve narrowed down citations and choices to the more household-known Nobel winners. Sorry, 1903 laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, you just missed the cut.

Oh, and let’s say a 10/10 gets you a coveted one-way ticket to Mars. Tell us your score in the comments!

1. “For having transported the destitution of man into his exaltation”

A. Albert Camus

B. Samuel Beckett

C. Isaac Bashevis Singer

2. “For a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”

A. Pablo Neruda

B. W.B. Yeats

C. T.S. Eliot

3. “For his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”

A. Rudyard Kipling

B. John Steinbeck

C. Eugene O’Neill

Continue reading →

Last year, a woman at the Anchor Bar in Superior, Wisc. wanted our picture taken after I gave her a book.

World Book Night was a lot of fun last year. I hit two iconic bars in Superior, Wisconsin, the hard-scrabble, blue-collar town across the St. Louis River from Duluth, Minnesota, where I gave away 20 copies of A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. This year, I decided to go outside of my comfort zone again, drive over the bridge to Superior, and give away copies of Population: 485 by Michael Perry, who writes books about his life and times in a small town in the Wisconsin north woods. There’s also, for me, one degree of separation between Perry and me: his cousin, Penny Perry, a native of Wisconsin who now lives in Duluth, is a friend of mine. I felt like this gave me instant street cred.

Things didn’t start so auspiciously: I dropped a book in a puddle even before I left Duluth. But once I got to Superior, it picked up – I ended giving away all 19 copies in less than 30 minutes, minus driving time.

I started off at about 5 pm at the Red Mug Café, a hole-in-the-wall not far from the bridge between Minnesota and Wisconsin. I approached a table of four middle-aged women, enjoying each other over cups of coffee. “Happy World Book Night!” I exclaimed, explaining that on April 23 each year, volunteers “all over the country like myself” give away books to strangers. Holding up Population: 485, I said, “Michael Perry writes about small-town life in northern Wisconsin. Can you relate to that, or what?” The women were very kind, and all four of them took a book and graciously thanked me. Emboldened, I walked around the café and handed out books to a woman slurping a bowl of soup; a middle-aged man on his iPhone, who was initially reluctant, but said, “Well, I am flying to Chicago; I do need something to read on the plane;” and to a young man at the counter, who high-fived me after I handed him a book and told him, “Books rock! Reading rocks!” Continue reading →

I felt like one of those women handing out cigarettes in yesteryear. If you’re too young to remember them, you may have seen pictures. Except I have a couple years on most of those women, o.k. all of them, and rather than a sexy outfit, I chose a heavy down jacket over which I wore a sandwich-board sign, and I use the term loosely, made with a reflective vest covered over with a couple World Book Night flyers in clear page protectors. I don’t know if it helped, but I wasn’t too cold last night, given the drizzle and chill.

Last year when I was a “giver” at World Book Night, I chose a spot across from the Central Square T station in Cambridge, Mass., and found it difficult to break down people’s resistance to taking a book. They thought I was trying to foist a Bible on them, or maybe I was part of some cult. This year I was determined that it shouldn’t be so hard to give away 20 books. To get in the mood I used the pre-WBN kick off event at the Cambridge Public Library with Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers), Lisa Genova (Still Alice), and Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) as a pep rally. It certainly got the high school students in the row next to me wound up. They wanted to sign up then and there to be givers. So did a former educator who had read Still Alice in her book group and had never heard of WBN.

I was especially pleased to get to hear Diffenbaugh, since I had chosen her novel to give away.  A debut novel by a local author seemed like an easier sell than many of the more “classic” books on last year’s list. Plus I had one other trick for getting people to take my books. Since her book is so interconnected with flowers, I decided to buy 20 carnations from Brattle Florist, the same florist shop in her acknowledgments, to handout with each book. That was before I learned from Gaiman’s talk that April 23 marks Cervantes’s death and in Spain men give women a rose, and women give them a book on that day. The first Book Day, as it is known, was held on Cervantes’s birthday (October 7) in 1926, then moved to April in 1930. Continue reading →

Every now and then, PWxyz likes to let the staff around here talk about books, because that’s all we secretly want to do. Previously, the PW staff has Fixed the Modern Library 100 Novels List, named some favorite short stories, and picked the best books read in 2011 and 2012. Here, we asked: What’s the first book you read that really made you love books? Let us know yours in the comments!

Andrew Albanese, senior writer: The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald

Easy…

For me, it was The Great Brain series, by John Dennis Fitzgerald. In the mid-1970s, while I was in elementary school, my family began spending winters at my grandparents home on Oneida Lake, in upstate New York, so we could care for my great grandmother while my grandparents wintered in Florida. The move meant a special, 45-minute bus ride to school every day, with kids I didn’t know and who apparently were predisposed to not liking new kids. Or, maybe they just didn’t like me. So, there I was. 10 years old, in a rural lake house, in winter, no smartphones or Internet, of course, and only three blurry channels on TV, when the signal could penetrate the lake effect snow. But whatever, I never watched TV, I had to go to bed early every night so I could wake up at the crack of dawn to catch that snakepit of a bus to school. And then one day, our school librarian took pity on my brother and me, and sent us home with The Great Brain books. I have to admit, I can’t remember many details of the books today—but I’ll never forget my brother and I staying up late into the night reading the books together with a flashlight. Continue reading →

PWxyz’s Great American Novel Poll closed yesterday, and after nearly 5,000 votes, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was the runaway winner, taking almost 20% of the vote. But what did we learn from the poll? Here are a few observations.

1. We included 60 books in the field, and the last four to tally one single vote were: Sister Carrie, The Naked and the Dead, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and The Known World.

2. At least in our prediction, The Catcher in the Rye would’ve ranked quite high, but it was only able to get 2% of the vote.

3. The most popular beat is Kerouac: On the Road outpaced his contemporary Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and received 77 total votes. Continue reading →

The following is an excerpt from Matthew Kahn’s project 100 Years, 94 Books–to review the bestselling books of the last 100 years and study what made them essential to their cultural moment.

 Who?

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) remains popular to this day, and is best known for his work as one of the fathers of science fiction. Wells was born in the county of Kent in England.  Growing up, his family had considerable financial trouble resulting in Wells’s placement in various harsh apprenticeship programs as a child and teenager, giving him experiences which lent themselves to some of his novels (e.g. Kipps).  He later became a teacher and, in 1895, wrote his first (and possibly most famous) novel, The Time Machine.  Between 1895 and 1901, Wells published three non-fiction books and eight more novels, including The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

Wells wrote prolifically about social and economic issues, and put forth many volumes on better ways to organize the world.  He wrote extensively on the subject of utopias and authored many non-fiction works on popular history. Yet he is remembered for little else than his science fiction, despite having published over fifty novels at the time of his death, and even more non-fiction books.  Wells passed away due to undetermined medical causes in 1946.

So what’s this book about?

Mr. Britling Sees It Through can be best explained by this passage from the novel itself:

“This story is essentially the history of the opening and of the realisation of the Great War as it happened to one small group of people in Essex, and more particularly, as it happened to one human brain” (216).

The titular Mr. Britling is a writer primarily of essays and non-fiction books on social issues of the day and larger aspects of human nature. The novel begins with the arrival of Mr. Direck, an American who has come to ask Mr. Britling to give a lecture in Massachusetts.  Mr. Direck stays at Mr. Britling’s home in Matching’s Easy, along with Mrs. Britling, Mr. Britling’s secretary Teddy, his wife Letty and sister-in-law Cecily (whom Mr. Direck immediately falls for), Herr Heinrich (a German student), the Britlings’ two young sons, and Hugh Britling (Mr. Britling’s older son from his first marriage). The first section of the novel establishes these characters and focuses on the British attitude leading up to the outbreak of World War One. The rest of the novel focuses on how life and attitudes changed (or refused to change) while some characters left for war.

Read the full post on Kahn’s blog.

If you’re looking for a new literary Tumblr to go along with SlushPile Hell and Life in Publishing, look no further than Dumb Poetry, which is exactly what you think it is. Head over to check out the terribleness, because Dumb Poetry is the only place you’ll find the line: “Baby boy, please come to my party in the sky?” Please, indeed.

About a month ago, I was searching for something Stephen King-related to put on this fantastic blog. Scrolling down through rows and rows of Google images for The Shining, most of them screengrabs of Nicholson and the pre-chopped-up girls in the hallway, I saw, in thumbnail size, the above cover for O Iluminado. It looked strikingly similar to an 80s Pantene ad.

I saved the cover on my desktop, knowing I wanted to share it with you all in some way, but not sure how. For weeks, I’d open the file and stare into O Iluminado‘s eyes, and then into her smaller set of eyes. I would look at it for so long it would change; I named the mysterious woman Flavia; she became strange to me and then familiar in her strangeness. I had so many questions.

Who is Flavia? In what public place is she on the cover? Why is she also in a little window? Continue reading →