Columns

Book Launches, Portland Style

December 3rd, 2015

Launch your book with hijinks and mayhem. And doughnuts! Coffee, beer, bikes, hipsters and books. Those are the typical words associated with Portland, Oregon. Oh, and legal pot.  And doughnuts. Yup, we celebrate all the vices in our rainy left-coast city, so it’s only fitting that when it comes to launching books, our freak flag flies higher than most.

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Don't Say 'Macbeth': The Curse of the Scottish Play On Stage and Screen

December 2nd, 2015

The latest film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth hits US theaters on December 4, starring Michael Fassbender as the doomed murderer. Perhaps more than any of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth has a great deal of superstition surrounding its actual performances. Saying the title of the play during production (or even while in a theater) has long been considered the catalyst of great misfortune. There are remedies: you have to run out of the theater and spin around three times.

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LitReactor Staff Picks: The Best Books of 2015

December 2nd, 2015

Another year has come and gone. You know what that means, don't you? Time for a bunch of strangers to tell you what was good! And why should you care what the LitReactor writers think are the best books of the year? Trick question! You shouldn't. But what they have to say might interest you nonetheless, because they are good-looking and knowledgeable and they read like the wind. So for those who care, we submit for your approval/derision some of LitReactor's favorite reads of 2015.

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One Month of Reading Ryu Murakami: A Primer

December 1st, 2015

Image via Pushkin Press You might be familiar with Ryu Murakami even if you don’t think you are, thanks to the popularity of Takashi Miike’s Audition. Whenever Japanese horror films are mentioned, Audition is at the centre of the discussion alongside the likes of Ju-On, Ringu and Dark Water.

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UPDATED WITH WINNER - LitReactor's Flash Fiction Smackdown: 5 Word Story Edition

November 30th, 2015

Flash fiction: A style of fictional literature marked by extreme brevity Welcome to LitReactor's Flash Fiction Smackdown, a monthly bout of writing prowess. How It Works We give you inspiration in the form of a picture, poem, video, or prompt. You write a flash fiction piece using the inspiration we gave you. Put your entry in the comments section. One winner will be picked and awarded a prize.

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Inhuman History: 6 Must Read Inhumans Comics

November 30th, 2015

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is massive and ever-expanding. One of the biggest shared universes in film. Which is good, because there’s still a great deal of comics to cover. As the movies continue to reach further into space with the Infinity Stone storyline, more and more characters with interstellar roots are being introduced.

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Ready Player One: 5 Books About Video Games

November 30th, 2015

Nerd culture is everywhere these days. A relatively new-ish development has been a slew of video game related novels (no, I'm not talking about novelizations and tie-ins). With the kids that grew up in the '80s with Amigas and SNES, who are now in their 30s and 40s, this was bound to happen. Just look at Adam Sandler's Pixels (by no means a good movie, but leaps and bounds better than his usual fare, like *shudder* Grown Ups 2).

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Book vs. Film vs. TV Series: Red Dragon vs. Manhunter vs. Red Dragon vs. Hannibal

November 27th, 2015

Of all the Hannibal Lecter adaptations, none has featured so prominently on screen as Red Dragon, Thomas Harris's first in a four book series. To date, this novel has been made into two feature films and one TV series, respectively: Manhunter (1986), Red Dragon (2002) and the painfully short-lived Hannibal (2013-2015), which mines from Harris's book throughout its first and second seasons, and directly features its plot in the latter half of season 3. 

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Five Ray Bradbury Stories That Tell Us Everything We Need to Know About Writing.

November 27th, 2015

Fiction traffics in a tension between the impossible and the possible, and no writer walked this line with more guts and style than Ray Bradbury. Conflict—between or within characters—is at the heart of fiction, but in these five stories (he wrote more than six hundred of them) Bradbury shows us how only an escalating tension between style and substance—between what a story is trying to say and how it is trying to say it—can give fictional struggles the power to truly move us.

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5 Holiday Writing Hacks

November 25th, 2015

The holiday season is upon us. So much to do! So many people to see! So much food to eat and booze to consume! So many group activities in which we must take part!  All that warm, fuzzy togetherness is part of the joy of the season. But we all know that when you don't get time to write, you're a total pain in the ass. So do yourself and your family a favor this holiday season and avail yourself of these tricky writing hacks.

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