Olivia Cooke stole the show in Ready Player One. Jack O’Connell won our hearts with his performance in Unbroken. Now, these two actors are teaming up for an exciting new adaptation that you’ll be sure to remember for decades to come… even if its protagonists end up remembering nothing at all. (You’ll just have to wait and see!)
Images Via IMDb
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Cooke and O’Connell will star in Little Fish. The film is based off of Aja Gabel’s short story of the same name, an ambitious, speculative romance that tells the story of a couple struggling to stay together in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. And here’s where the speculative fiction comes in: the pandemic erases people’s memories, “Little Fish” was initially published in the literary magazine Phoebe. You can read a small excerpt of the story on Gabel’s website to get hyped for the film.
Though there is no word yet on a release date for the film beyond a general estimate (2020), other details are available: the film will be directed by Chad Hartigan and written by Mattson Tomlin. In addition to her starring role, Olivia Cooke is also among the many executive producers of the film. While we don’t yet know which roles these actors will play, Raul Castillo and Soko have also been cast in the adaptation.
Fortunately, shooting will begin later this month, so we don’t have to wait too long!
Rafiki, a film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu that depicts lesbian love, has been recognized at the largest African film festival, Fespaco. The festival has awarded Samantha Mugatsia “best actress” for her portrayal of Kena Mwaura.
According to IMDb, the film tells the tale of Kena and Ziki, two girls who “long for something more. When love blossoms between them, the two girls will be forced to choose between happiness and safety.” It is inspired by the short story “Jambula Tree” by Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko.
IMAGE VIA HUMANMOVENT
The award is significant because the film is banned in Kenya, the country it was directed in—an extension of the laws against homosexuality in the country.
The laws, though “recent” as far as their imposition in 20th century by British colonial rule, seem to reflect public opinion of much of the country; 90 percent of respondents to a Pew survey conducted in Kenya in 2013 said that “society should not accept homosexuality.” The laws and public aversion to homosexuality fuel each other in a hateful cycle, since “family members and neighbors sometimes report suspected homosexuals to the police.”
IMAGE VIA PINKNEWS
The country’s High Court is set to either uphold or overturn its ruling against gay sex on May 24th, several months after it was originally supposed to decide in February.
In the midst of such conflicting public opinion, the film’s being recognized by Fespaco is an undeniable achievement, and hopefully foreshadows what’s to come for gay rights in Kenya!
The trio who previously worked together on Donnybrook are now teaming up once again, this time for an adaptation of Tobias Wolff’s short story “The Chain”! How exciting!
According to Deadline, Jaime Bell and Margaret Qualley will be starring in director Tim Sutton’s upcoming thriller, The Chain. Denise Gough (Colette) and Sebastian Stan (Avengers: Infinity War) are also rumored to have joined the feature adaptation.
Image Via comingsoon.net
Tobias Wolff’s award-winning short story “The Chain” follows a story of a man’s daughter who is attacked by a dog, setting off a chain of events driven by vengeance. Jonathan Deckter, president and COO of Voltage Pictures, told Deadline:
“The incomparable Tobias Wolff is one of my favorite authors and we’re even bigger fans of Jaime Bell since working with him on the powerful feature skin.”
Rumble Films’ David Lancaster (Whiplash, Nighcrawler, Eye in the Sky) and Stephanie Wilcox (Small Crimes, Donnybrook) will produce.
In case if you’re not familiar with Bell’s and Qualley’s catalog, and what other projects you might recognize them from: Bell recently starred in Skin, Sutton’s Donnybrook, AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies, Fantastic Four, and Snowpiercer, and upcoming projects are Rocketman, and The Adventures of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun. Qualley is best known for HBO’s series The Leftovers, and she starred in The Nice Guys, Netflix’s 10, and Donnybrook. She will be seen in FX’s mini series Fosse/Verdon starring with Sam Rockwell, Michelle Williams, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Click on here to listen to the audio version of The Chain, and immerse yourself into the story before it hit the screens! The Chain will begin production in April.
We can never get enough of Sylvia Plath. A short story, a ‘lost’ story, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, is now available published by Faber Stories 55 years after her death. We first reported on this in October, when it was announced that the story would be made available in 2019, and now here we are! The story was published by Faber on January 3rd, and is now available on Amazon.
Image Via Faber.co.uk
Plath was twenty-years-old when she submitted this story to Mademoiselle magazine, who rejected it, though she had won the publication’s fiction contest the year before. According to The New Yorker, critic and academic Judith Glazer-Raymo unearthed the story while doing research into Plath’s works and other archives.
Image Via Thenational.scot
Harper Perennial is expected to publish the book with an alternative book cover design—illustrated with train tracks following the sunset—available on Amazon, January 15th. Here is how the cover looks like along with its Amazon synopsis:
Image Via Amazon
Never before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman’s rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life.
Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman’s fateful train journey.
Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like “guilt, and guilt, and guilt”: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.
“But what is the ninth kingdom?” she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. “It is the kingdom of the frozen will,” comes the reply. “There is no going back.”
Sylvia Plath’s strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.
People love the development a novel can arrange, yet we all agree that shorter story sometimes surprises us with its short but fierce punch. Recently, the 4th BAME Short Story Prize, sponsored by the Guardian, released this year’s shortlist of the final six. Flying from the Yangtze River in China to Ladbroke Grove in London, the stories unfolds an amazing tour of the contemporary globe.
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
The prize is competitive. Three hundred stories, each of which is limited in 6,000 words, were submitted for BAME whose dedication is to support works written by African American, Asian, and minority ethnic writers. The prize has been received by some great writers including Guy Gunaratne whose debut novel In Our Mad and Furious City recently has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize 2018 and Lisa Smith, the winner last year whose story “Auld Lang Syne” was published on the Guardian website. Smith said:
To get some recognition as a new writer has made an unbelievable difference to me…Writing is exposing, so to have people from the literary world praise my work and reward it was a tremendous boost to my confidence.
Reggie, a widower, is determined to make something good from grief. He misses listening to his wife’s music so he puts her old piano out on the street for anyone to use. The music that people plays starts to bring a community of strangers slightly closer together.
Gurnaik Johal was born in West London and studies English Literature with Creative Writing at The University of Manchester.
“Swimmer of the Yangtze” by Yiming Ma
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
Set in Cultural Revolution China, ‘Swimmer of Yangtze’ follows the unlikely rise and fall of an armless swimmer born in a nameless village near Wuhan. Narrated by an elder, the story is an unforgiving exploration of how societies mercilessly create and abandon their heroes.
Yiming Ma is a Chinese-Canadian writer and recent graduate of Stanford University. Previously, he lived in London where he worked with schools for low-income families in SE Asia and Africa. His writing has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine and been shortlisted by Glimmer Train and Geist. His story ‘Swimmer of Yangtze’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and 2018 LitMag Virginia Woolf Award. Recently, he was honored with a 2018 Artist’s Grant by the Vermont Studio Center, the largest international artist residency in the United States. He will join Penguin Random House UK/Europe this Fall 2018 as Entrepreneur-in-Residence.
“Bus Stop” by Varaidzo
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
Marley stands out, the black sheep in a white area, but her close friendship with cool Lara exposes a worlds of pixies, whispering trees, and changeling children. Soon, the town’s local folklore might hold the key for Marley to fit in.
Varaidzo is a writer and editor based in London. Her essays and articles have been published in the Guardian, New Statesman and award-winning essay anthology The Good Immigrant amongst others. She is currently an assistant editor at Wasafiri and is working on her first novel.
“Spam” by Savannah Burney
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‘Spam’ follows the unlikely encounter between a cynical and misanthropic B&B owner and a bright young girl, who along with her mother, become unexpected guests in the morning after the Grenfell fire.
Savannah Burney was born in Manchester to an Indian mother and a British father who was in the army. She grew up in a number of different countries, including Hong Kong and Germany. She now considers the North West to be her home – despite recently making the move to London! She graduated in 2016 with a degree in Biomedical Sciences and has worked at the World Health Organisation and in the charity sector. She enjoys writing whenever she can and next month will start a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work.
“Something Buried in the Ground” by Jason Deelchand
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A stench invades the historic village of Xīliú and takes residence. As the villagers begin to die, a teenage girl named Liu Fang decides to investigate.
Jason is a secondary-school teacher based in Bristol. He studied in Bath and Exeter and has also lived in Bournemouth, Cornwall, and Shanghai. His main interests aside from reading and writing are music and nature. Jason loves coastlines, waterfalls, wolves, whales, and trees – one day soon he would like to plant a tree. His father is Mauritian; his mother is English (with some Scottish ancestry). This makes him mixed-race, apparently.
“City of Culture” by Kit Fan
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Mai, a teenage girl from a seaside northern city, lives with her absent mother and works in her grandmother’s Chinese takeaway after school. In a wake of a family crisis, she struggles to find her voice while participating in her school debate on the EU Referendum.
Kit Fan is a poet and fiction writer. In 2018, he won a Northern Writers’ Award for Diamond Hill, a novel-in-progress. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize and TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize.
With the prize of £1,000 and an exclusive one-day publishing workshop and online publication on the Guardian website. The winner will be revealed on September 12th at a prize ceremony in London! Let’s see how the judges think about the good candidate for the honor:
No matter who wins, let’s wait for the release of the above-mentioned stories!
