Fusenews: The Shape of Sushi

• Alert alert alert!  There’s a new Elephant and Piggie book coming out soon.  Check out Mo’s blog for the cover, running free and wild in its natural environment. And he has another post up about a very different picture book coming out this January.  The cover is a bit of a problem since I looked at it and then made this extremely unladylike snort at the reference desk, causing the whole library to turn and slowly stare at me. Doggone it, Mo!  In other new release news, looks like TOON Books successfully tapped the talented Harry Bliss for an upcoming title.

• Am I the only one who, upon hearing that Penguin was creating a dating site for book lovers, suddenly had a mental image of penguins dating?  Very And Tango Makes Three of me, don’t you think?   

• Brian Selznick breaks woman’s laptop. Considering that he is THE nicest man in the world, you’re right to be skeptical.  Estimated time to becoming a fully tabloid related blog in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1  . . .

• Vogue picture of Daniel Radcliff (I almost wrote Harry) in Equus.  A word of warning to the wise; the shot was taken by Annie Leibovitz so the young man is a bit.. ah… exposed, shall we say.  Thanks to The Longstockings for the link.  Brave feller.

• This is vaguely YA related but it involves book jackets so I’m going to link to it anyway (slow kidlit news day, doncha know).  Alison over at ShelfTalker gives the new Flux catalog at huge gold star and major thumbs up for their upcoming covers.  I have to admit, they’re amazing.  Not the usual chopped heads/back of the heads/feet I see so often.  I’ll direct you to her site for the bulk of them, but here’s one I just couldn’t help but post here:

Wow.  Gutsy.  Cool retro gutsy.

• I’m one of those English majors who scoffed at the idea of taking Latin in high school and then secretly wished that she had for the rest of her natural born life.  I bring this up because Sam Riddleburger was recently talking  about how there’s been a fair amount of discussion out there about children’s books that skip all that dull exposition and jump into the thick of the action from page one onward.  The term in Latin is "In Media Res", which sounds cool.  He then goes on to quote Trollope’s take on the matter.  So far the score is one Latin term and one reference to Trollope for a total literary bonus score of 52.  Readers are invited to try to up their own scores by writing blog posts that quote ancient Greek and quote Balzac at length.

• HMOCL #34 illustrator S. Britt has done what I would love to believe every artist does in their spare time.  He has created a Before and After Flickr page of his "Doodle Room".  It’s an incredibly satisfying thing to watch. Put it on the slideshow setting for extra oomph. Thanks to Drawn for the link.

• Zut alors!  I’ve nearly missed the reprinting of an old Tove Jansson title by New York Review of Books!  Called The Summer Book the rerelease was apparently this past May.  As  The Sandbox says of it, "In The Summer Book, Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer ‘its sunlight and storms’ into twenty-two crystalline vignettes."  Fans of the Moomintroll persuasion should sit up and take notice.  See this Sandbox post for more information.

• Daily Image:

I am the last person to post about this, but that’s okay.  As far as I can determine, the Cake Wrecks blog is to pastry what the Photoshop Disasters blog is to the visual image.  A train wreck either way you look at it.  There was a lot to choose from on the site, but I found the most recent picture the most painful (and it continues yesterday’s rubber ducky theme too):

Thanks to Big A little a (who in turn got it from Mental Floss ) for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews