Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard and Dominic Cooper Tucson Weekly

11.11.09

For the most part, I don't like new horror movies, but then I may just be too sensitive to enjoy the pastoral image of a woman being fed into a food processor by a man in a clown mask. I receive that this is a matter of taste, and that perfectly decent people who never compare universal health care to Nazi concentration camps can, and do, lift spending evenings eating popcorn while looking at scenes of simulated and sexualized vivisection.

My biggest question with horror movies, though, is that I do like scary movies, and I just don't find horror films to be very scary. But An Education , which is ostensibly a cautionary narrative/coming-of-age film, is terrifying. It's the most effectively frightening film I've seen since that Larry King/Tom Put on ice sex video was accidentally shown on Oprah .

An Education is, nonetheless, not a horror movie. Rather, it's a memoir of a few months in the individual of Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan), a 16-year-old girl living outside of London in the near the start 1960s. Her middle-class parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) want her to go to Oxford, because they about that's where you meet rich men who know how to pronounce "Alcibiades." Jenny follows along with their plan by studying unyielding, learning to play the cello so she'll have an outside interest to put on her college application, and avoiding England's most common malady: Guinness-induced pregnancy.

Source:

Harlequin puts on the Evil Clown Mask

Reverential Moly, do interesting things ever happen when you're off doing something else!

I just popped into (onto?) some of my favorite writing forums and bulletin boards, only to be confronted with the Harlequin Horizons thing.

What is this thing?

Romance giant Harlequin is putting out a new road, called Horizons. That itself odd (publishers run new lines all the time), but the details?

Harlequin has partnered with Author Solutions (that's frivolousness press AuthorHouse, guys) and this ENTIRE line is going to be pay to play.

Hoo Boy!

For only $1500, give or take, any writer can now say they've been published by Harlequin, regardless of whether that manuscript is publishable, or even functionally literate. (That's the dream/horror of vanity presses, innit?)

Of course, these books will not be on the shelf at your local bookstore - like any other bootlessness printed manuscript, all sales are left up to the writer.

Which is a HUGE stain on Harlequin's reputation. Do they want to remainder a legitimate publisher, or become yet another vanity press?

Update: Apparently the backlash was violent enough that HH changed it's name to DellArt demand. Smart move guys - I bet the RWA would have had fits about a thousand vanity press writers claiming Harlequin publication!

For more conversations about the unalloyed mess:

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/want-to-self-publish-how-about-harlequin/

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162391&call=1

For the vanity site:

http://www.dellartepress.com/


They also seem to have taken a cue from other vanity presses by using a name that could be confused with a standard publisher (Dell) which is still incredibly underhanded - but at least Harlequin gets to try and dust off its famous for.


Update/Edit:

Even the New Yorker...

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