Stephen Colbert held the first ever "cOlbert's Book Club" last night, dedicating his entire show to a discussion of inaugural book The Great Gatsby in a swanky new studio with guests like Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Great Gatsby movie director Baz Luhrmann, and star Carey Mulligan. See the rest of the show below if you want to watch Stephen Colbert's almighty media empire continue to expand:
Jason Segel revealed earlier this month that he has a series of young adult novels on the way, and now, we've learned the books' titles and what they're about. Entitled Nightmares!, the series is "an adventure story about a group of kids who realize it’s up to them to save their town from fear, which has manifested itself in the form of nightmare creatures that have slipped into the everyday world." Segel, who has previously written movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets, said in a statement, "Ultimately, it’s a story about learning that we can accomplish anything, as long as we are brave enough to try. These [...]
Fox is turning the profane children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep into a movie, and Deadline reports that Ken Marino and Erica Oyama Marino, the husband-wife team behind the hilarious Yahoo web series Burning Love, are writing the script. From author Adam Mansbach and illustrator Ricardo Cortes, Go the Fuck to Sleep is described as "a children's book for adults" that follows a frustrated father not being able to get his daughter to sleep. An audiobook version read by Samuel L. Jackson (embedded below) became a big internet hit two years ago. This seems like an awfully flimsy basis for a movie and as The AV [...]
Screenwriter and wildly-popular Twitterer Kelly Oxford's first book, Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar, is set to come out on Tuesday, but it's available for preorder now. The book is a collection of comic essays from Oxford's life, covering her childhood and adult life as a parent, and if it's anything like her Twitter feed or blog, it should be super funny. In the past couple years, Oxford has sold two TV pilots and a movie script and seen her Twitter follower count exceed 450,000. Her book has blurbs from Cameron Crowe, Diablo Cody, and Lena Dunham, and if it's good enough for them, [...]
Vernon Chatman, who runs the production company PFFR and has written and/or produced a list of shows a mile long that includes Wonder Showzen, South Park, and Louie, is releasing a new book next month called Mindsploitation: Asinine Assignments for Online Homework Cheating Industry. For the book, Chatman paid a bunch of online companies to write a series of absurd essays for him to test the limits of the homework-for-hire industry. Louis C.K., who met Chatman when they were both writing for The Chris Rock Show and recently hired him to produce Louie, wrote the intro to the book, and Matt Stone, John Hodgman, and Bill Hader all blurbed [...]
The very funny Julie Klausner has a new young adult novel, Art Girls Are Easy, coming out on e-book tomorrow and in print next month, and Jezebel has an exclusive excerpt from it, which you could be reading right now instead of this sentence if you clicked on that link.
Beloved humorist Jack Handey (SNL's Deep Thoughts, The New Yorker), has written his first novel. Entitled The Stench of Honolulu: A Tropical Adventure, the lean 240-page book is set for release on July 16th. Here's the official summary:
Are you a fan of books in which famous tourist destinations are repurposed as unlivable hellholes for no particular reason? Read on! Jack Handey's first novel is an exotic tale with laugh-out-loud twists and unforgettable characters. A reliably unreliable narrator and his friend, some guy named Don, need to get out of town. They have a taste for adventure, so they pay visit to a relic of bygone days-a travel [...]
Jason Segel revealed yesterday that he has written a series of three young adult novels and that he hopes to have the first one released later this year. Segel spoke about the books for the first time last night at a Forgetting Sarah Marshall screening and Q&A hosted by filmmaker Jonathan Demme in Pleasantville, New York. The book series, which is currently the subject of a bidding war between publishing houses, is based on Segel's first screenplay for a kids adventure movie, which he sold to a movie studio for "super cheap" when he was 21 because he "didn't know any better." Segel bought the script back from the [...]
I remember picking up Mike Sacks's book And Here's the Kicker, a collection of interviews with some of the greatest comedy writers ever, when it was released back in 2009, and instantly devouring it. I couldn't cram the words into my brain fast enough. While my peers' childhood heroes were pro skateboarders and wrestlers, I instead worshiped comedy writers, and in Sacks's book, here they all were – Letterman head writer Merrill Markoe, original Simpsons scribe George Meyer, and '80s comedy king Harold Ramis – talking at length on the subject of humor writing. I recall this distinct feeling that there had never been anything more perfectly suited [...]
At a panel featuring the cast and crew of The Mindy Project at Los Angeles's PaleyFest this weekend, star/creator Mindy Kaling revealed she's working on her second book. Kaling says the untitled non-fiction book will cover "the high highs and low lows of the past 18 months," which she spent leaving her job of 8 years at The Office to star in her own ratings-challenged but successful series on Fox. She expects the book to be out in late 2014. When asked about The Office's hour-long series finale, which is set to air May 16th, Kaling confirmed she'll be appearing in the episode. "It’s really exciting," she told [...]
Megan Amram is writing a book about science. Publisher's Weekly reports that Amram, a comedy writer who amassed hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers before landing a job on Parks and Recreation's writing staff, sold a book to Scribner Publishing. Called Science…for Her, the publisher describes it as a "faux-expert compendium of scientific knowledge" that plays with the “satirical conceit that ‘science is hard for most people, let alone women.'" Here's hoping she gets to keep her intentionally gross Twitter picture, which she describes as "Jabba the Hut on his Quinceañera," for her author bio.
Following in his Office cohort Mindy Kaling's footsteps, B.J. Novak is about to become an author. The publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced yesterday that Novak has signed a two-book deal with them. The first book will be a collection of short stories that Novak's agent compared to Woody Allen's early books when talking to The New York Times. Novak's fictional stories are adapted from his live show at Los Angeles's UCB Theatre, B.J. Novak: Uncollected Stories. After departing the office alongside Kaling last May, Novak is serving as as a writer and consulting producer on The Mindy Project this season. There's no word on what the second [...]
Parks and Recreation co-creator / showrunner Mike Schur is a noted fan of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, and prior to last night's new episode, he tweeted that it would contain several references to the novel. As Schur discussed with The New York Times a couple years ago, he's completely obsessed with the novel, so much that he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Infinite Jest at Harvard and met Wallace after inviting him to campus to receive an award from The Harvard Lampoon. Schur even owns the film rights to the book, although he doesn't have plans to turn it into a movie anytime soon. He [...]
Comedian and author Julie Klausner announced today via Twitter that her second book, a young adult novel about an all-girls arts camp called Art Girls Are Easy, is coming out May 7th. Klausner, who writes for Billy on the Street, hosts the podcast How Was Your Week? and authored the 2010 memoir I Don't Care About Your Band, also mentioned that an excerpt of the book would be available on Rookie later today. Amy Poehler blurbed Art Girls Are Easy, writing, "Read everything Julie Klausner writes and listen to everything Julie Klausner says. She is hilarious, wise and smarter than you. She has a way of [...]
