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About This Blog
Michael Merschel: Michael Merschel edits books coverage for The Dallas Morning News. November 2010
Recent Posts
George W. Bush to sign Decision Points in Dallas Late-breaking author event: Lori Ann Stephens at SMU B&N Bookstore Brandon Sanderson visits Dallas on Thursday Want to write for a literary journal? "The First Line" wants you Going to the World Series with Dave Eggers Rick Riordan's lastest novels take on new myths Audio review: Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia" Jimmy Carter to visit Grapevine on Friday Next week in books: Noteworthy new releases Local writers in the news: From Maud Hart Lovelace to "extreme" space Categories
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Entertainment Blogs |
Between Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and the upcoming Shutter Island (directed by Martin Scorsese), Dennis Lehane has become the most popular novelist to adapt for the movies. I sat down with him for a half hour Sunday afternoon to talk about his new epic novel The Given Day, and I had to ask him: do you ever write novels with movie adaptation in mind? "Never," he said quickly. "I don't say that to be cool or to say I'm so aesthetically wonderful. It's just that to me they're two completely different aesthetic beasts. Nothing could [mess] me up more when I was writing than to be thinking of Russell Crowe in the part. That doesn't allow my characters to breathe the way I need them to breathe. "Anybody who writes a book with a movie in mind, why not not just skip the process and write a screenplay?" he continues. "Books are hard, man. Save yourself the trouble. I write my books to be read." Lehane comes across as a no-nonsense type with very few pretensions or airs, every bit the product of the working class Boston milieu in which so many of his stories are set. We'll have a full story on him and The Given Day closer to it's publication in September. And if it does get turned into a movie, it'll be a long one: the book weighs in at 700 eminently readable pages. |
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