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
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
‘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
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
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
Image Via 4thestate.co.uk
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!
I know, you were worried that there wouldn’t be any more Stephen King news, but lucky for you, the legendary author of horror and suspense novels has recently released a free short story, Laurie, on his website. You can read it here!
King wrote the story about his wife’s dog, Vixen, who recently passed away. The story is a heartwarming tale about an old man and his pup. It’s just, you know, written by Stephen King so it’s bound to have a twist somewhere. It is only thirty-two pages, so why not read it on your lunch break?
Several people have asked me about the dedication at the end of “Laurie,” the story I posted. Vixen was my wife’s dog. We all loved her, but she was a one-woman Corgi. A sweeter, gentler dog you’d never meet. She died early this spring. pic.twitter.com/QtWhu5sIOh
The trailer for Cameron Mitchell’s film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story ‘How to Talk to Girls at Parties‘ has dropped, and it looks like fun. Punky, a little bit amusing, slightly crap. It has that kid from the very, very bad To the Bone in it, playing a similar charmingly baffled young Brit, only this time he’s a punk in 70s London who falls for an alien girl, played by Elle Fanning. I nearly wrote Elle Woods. I’m so good at this job. Pop culture references coming out my ears.
Via Popsugar
Anyway, the trailer begins in London, in 1977, with three young punks punking at a local punk venue, while being overseen by Nicole Kidman, who appears to be queen of the punks. Her blonde, slightly menacing presence in a film of this ilk forces me to relive unpleasant memories of when she played Mrs. Coulter in the unspeakably crap 2007 adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and therefore makes me uncomfortable. But that’s neither here nor there, as they say.
The three young punks then arrive at a large house, declaring, ‘Females await! Let’s get laid!’ and are met by what are very clearly aliens. Sexy, sexy aliens. You’d know Gaiman was behind this.
The trailer contains several amused-snort-worthy moments and Elle Fanning seems well cast as sexiest and most bemused alien very, although she’s no stranger to slightly strange, other-worldly roles after her performances in 2016’s The Neon Demon and The Beguiled.
In the end, How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks like what we can usually expect from Gaiman— amusing, occasionally vaguely sexist, inter-dimensional strangeness in an interesting setting— and I’m willing to give it a shot, despite a nagging suspicion that the funniest parts of the film may all appear in the trailer.
