The adaptation of Sally Rooney’s first novel can’t quite bring tricky source material – repressed characters, digital communication – to lifeIt was always unlikely that Conversations with Friends, the new Hulu and BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s first novel, would be able to repeat the lightning strike of Normal People. The latter show, another Hulu/BBC production based on Rooney’s bestselling second novel and released in April 2020, was the rare combination of right material, right time. Its straightforward, though elegantly told, premise – on-and-off, boy-girl love story over several years – and naturalistic, genuinely hot depictions of physical intimacy (one sex scene lasted 9 minutes and 24 seconds, a full third of the episode) struck a nerve during a time of mass isolation.Conversations with Friends is a harder sell. The book and series follow a thorny quadrangle of sex and friendship between two best friends/ex-lovers and an older married couple – none of whom, in classic Rooney fashion, seem party to their own motivations. It’s a murkier tangle than Normal People, made even more inaccessible by the characters’ psychological opaqueness and general aversion to speaking. Key figures from Normal People – Irish production company Element Pictures, director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Alice Birch – strive for a similar quiet, meditative realism on Conversations, with characters who communicate more frequently, and significantly, through text and email. (Rooney co-wrote... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2022-05-24 06:05:00 UTC ]
Key figures in the American publishing community are unified in their call for a lift of the US embargo of Cuba as it pertains to books. The post Cuba’s Book Embargo Tackled by Trade With White House Petitions appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2016-03-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Reviews editor Alex Crowley recommends 'The Pentagon's Brain,' about DARPA, the rationale and strategy that underpins defense science, and key figures in this shadowy world. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-11-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The BBC is adapting Hilary Mantel’s novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, following its recent adaptation of her Man Booker Prize-winning Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (all Fourth Estate). The 1992 novel tells the story of three young men who were key... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-05-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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