Will Romantasy Get a Shot at a Big-Time Adaptation?
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Hey, everybody. Just a note here at the top. We had some technical difficulties with the last 15, 20 minutes of the show. Basically, Rebecca's side is unusable. So I cut it off a little bit at the end of our talk about the Los Angeles book prizes, and then you hear a little bit at the end. Come join us at Powell's March 13th in Portland, Oregon, if you're around. You can find the link in the show notes to register there. Also, thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring the Book Riot podcast.

Frontless Foyer got cut out, but I want to say thanks to them for sponsoring 19 million books, new, used, free shipping to the US on orders of over $15. I told two stories in the sponsored spot there that I'll tell real quick here. One is I was at the bookstore recently.

And I won't name the bookstore, but I heard a couple people saying, yeah, I usually do my shopping at thriftbooks.com for books. I was like, whoa. And my daughter, like the same day, said, what do you want for your birthday? She said, I would like a thriftbooks.com gift.

gift card because she can get a whole bunch of books for not as much money. And when you are trying to build your library, that's a great way to go. Thank you all so much for listening. You can check out everything we're doing at bookriot.com slash listen. Choose an email, podcast at bookriot.com. All right, here we go. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Today we are talking about, well,

And we kind of touched on some of these, Rebecca, but I think we can get into them a little bit more. I've got an ACOTAR question for you. I meant to ask you the other day, so I'm going to get that to you as well. I'm sure I'm very qualified to answer it. Well, you sort of are, actually. I think in this regard, it's like from a generalist perspective. I see. Okay. On some unfortunate book banning-related news, finalists, new books, recent reading. But before all that,

We do have a link finally for if you want to come hang out with the pals the night of March 13th, 7 o'clock at the pals downtown here in Portland, Oregon where I am. Rebecca's not here. She lives in the internet right now. I will be there. You will be there. I'll be coming to you. We are going to be doing the

We're each picking 10 of the most – our picks for the 10 most recommendable books of the century so far. We do not know what the other person has chosen. We got Ernst & Young involved here like they do for the Academy Awards to make sure we have ballot security. No, we had a staff member, Caitlin, help us out and say, okay, we submitted to her. She said, you need to swap this one out. So I know there's a little bit of overlap, but there will not be in the final 10 books.

We'll talk about them. Tickets are 15 bucks, but they go towards buying something at Powell's. And if you're going to come to our show at Powell's, you're at least spending 15 bucks. So they're essentially free, right? That's how I'm thinking about it. I think so.

I think so. We're going to hand sell the crap out of these 20 books. And if you magically have read all 20 of them, which I think would be kind of a surprise, but would be awesome. Would be awesome. You can pick something else. But I think we're going to try to persuade you on our most recommendable. I have some other ideas about audience participation things. I wonder what we think about like book riot bingo might be. That's interesting. I like that. Well, let's do five minutes here because this is what we call content marketing, Rebecca. Let's do a sponsor break and we'll come back.

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Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. So I have a couple ideas. We've talked about them, and people can email us at podcast.bookwire.com if they like these. Usually what happens, I've found, this happens when you have way more listeners than you are yourself. They have better ideas or spins on it or takes on them. So one thought would be, who's got the most recommendable pod? Like just who kind of preview draft style? There's one like that. Another one would be, in terms of audience participation, could be maybe some Q&A like

On the fly recommendation requests. We could do something like that. We could have people submit their own recommendable book picks. Like, you know, I don't know if we do it on Instagram as a poll or just writing like animals on pieces of paper or whatever. Submit them. See. Could there be a show of hands for whether or not people have read this book or not?

Yes. As we go down the list. I like that one. What else do you have? Anything else in the chamber that you want to float to the body politic? I think our expectation is that the audience will be a mix of Book Riot podcast listeners and Powell's folks who find out about the event and are interested in coming. So I did think...

book riot podcast bingo would be funny that whether you know the show or not you can listen for some of you know the buzzwords the common things that come up jeff makes an analogy one of us says wheelhouse you know that kind of thing might occur so i'm going to think about that i think that might be easy to put together and one thing

that I've been noodling on that's not really audience participation, but maybe we could have folks guess is you and I were able to conclude because I had to swap one title and you had to swap two, that that meant three out of our 20 were overlaps. And we were trying to figure out what percentage of our reading actually overlaps with each other in recent years, which we could do because we both have spreadsheets.

Like a mail merge situation. Yeah, right. So if you're game, you could send me your spreadsheet from the last five years and I'll merge them and we'll see what our overlap is. I did realize, I was looking at this. I'm missing a couple of years. They must be in a different spreadsheet or something because I have a reading list and I don't know what happened. So it's not, I don't think I have 10 years of comprehensive data. Oh yeah, 10 years is too many. Maybe if we did like three or five years. Eight is too few. 12 is too many. I mean, the-

our mind meld increases with each year. So it might be fun also to see the trajectory of like five years ago versus now. We'll do this again at the show, but as a way of get people interested. And also if you have, you know, somebody that's in the area, you know, recommend them, tell them it's a Taylor Swift concert. I don't care. They're going to like the bookstore and they're like, you know, just get them there.

Oh, that was the wrong calendar invite. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Clarissa. I sent you the wrong- Listen, I could be persuaded to do Taylor Swift karaoke afterwards. So you might not be totally lying. I could not. That is not going to happen. I know. I know. But we'll do some of this at the show. But what do we mean by most recommendable? We didn't really talk about this too much. I assume we came at it with kind of the same approach. Mine was-

I didn't want to just pick page turner things that everyone like, yeah, okay. The Thursday murder club. That's very, I recommend that to a lot of people, but I want a little meat on the bone is what I'm saying. I want people, I want it to be, I want it to hit the, the Oshie triple meaning happiness, richness. Yeah, that's,

I don't know that I did the exact same thing, but I had the same starting place of like, well, it can't just be the last 10 Oprah picks or some combination of books that have all been selected by Read with Jenna. But like Recommendable is a different beast from best books. It is. It's a different beast from necessarily from unputdownable books. Like Paige Turner can be part of it. I think it has to be really engaging to

One of the things that I'm looking for is a maybe not four quadrant hit, but widely appealing. And so like this ruled out a lot of literary fiction because like a lot of literary fiction is pretty hard to recommend because of like difficult subject matter or like a more difficult formal structure. So there might be some literary fiction on my list, but like I'm,

I'm sure we use some of the same references. I went back and checked like the New York Times 100 from the century. And a lot of those were things that was like, I love this book. I don't know about recommending it. So there's some stuff there, like a really memorable reading experience, something that makes you want to finish it, maybe even something that makes you want to talk about it with somebody where after you read, you want to recommend it. Sort of the place that I landed. Yeah.

Yeah. And so most popular books is, I mean, one I looked at, I'll tell you something that's not on my list. And Rebecca, if you need to plead the fifth with your face or whatever, please do this. But I looked hard at like The Women or The Nightingale by Kristen Hanna.

Oh, I didn't even think about those. That's not interesting. I mean, sure. Yeah. I think a lot of people like the women. It's all too easy. Yeah. Probably if I needed to recommend a book to save my life, like in Bill and Ted's Fighting the Grim Reaper style, maybe I'd go that route. But this is our show. This is our event. Yeah. We don't have to, you know, we're not trying to keep ourselves from the fiery maw of Satan. We're just trying to have a good time. I did set, like, you know, when we do the drafts, those are forward-looking, so usually we haven't read any of those books, or maybe one of us has read one or two of our titles in

in galleys, one of the guidelines I set for myself was I had to have read all of these. So I'm not going to recommend you something that I have not actually consumed myself. And so that knocks out Kristen Hanna and a lot of those like more popular and airport kinds of fiction for me as well. Another thought is that this isn't really audience participation, but maybe as a button, as a stinger, it's like,

the, the, our favorite books that are the least recommendable. Like the thing that's like the top of your internal leaderboard that you would have a really time handing off to somebody else. I mean, I mean, honestly, we do not part is not the worst kind of pick like that. Cause you need someone to be able to like, I can hang, you need someone to know, you need to know someone can hang with a book like that. And if they can hang with the book like that,

They probably already know, probably already know about it or something like this. And like just by virtue of what sales tell us, most readers are not choosing to hang with that flavor of literary fiction. So I don't find that to be super recommendable, much as I wish I could just, you know, stand on street corners and hand out copies of Hong Kong and know people are going to read them.

Yeah, let me introduce you to creating your own syllabi, Rebecca. It's a great experience. You have to read all this. I would find that very satisfying. Yeah, and then I will talk at you about it for 45 minutes for three days in a week before we move on to the next thing I made you read. God, I miss teaching so much sometimes. And then I'll tell you why I was so right to make you do it. Yeah, wasn't I right? Because there's this weird thing when you're introducing a book to 18-year-olds, especially in class, and you just put on the syllabus, it's almost like you wrote it a little bit. It's kind of like when you tell somebody else's joke and you still get a laugh.

Like, you get a little bit of the shine. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, wow, what a person of discernment. He recommended the Iliad. I can't believe it. Anyway. So, that's what's going on there. So, I'm guessing the Odyssey is not at the top of your most recommendable reads. Ah.

Well, if I pick a homer, I'm picking the Odyssey over the Iliad. Let's see. Other things about pals. If you do come, please say hello to us from there. It's weird. Yes, please do. I know it's weird to meet people that you've heard talking to your ear holes for a while. Yes, I am tall. Yes, Rebecca is short. We can sort of like get our chat GPT prompts of meeting someone like this out of the way. We get it. Thank you so much. It's weird. You like the show. Yes, I'm glad. Yeah. You thought I was taller on the internet. I know it already.

Yeah, I think maybe what we could do is when we're standing around talking to people, we could have you stand on a stack of books so that we're like people who know where to look. You know what, though? That's a great idea because we have to have headshots taken at Powell's the previous day. And I was thinking it's always really funny to watch photographers try to like solve the problem of the massive height difference between us. So, yeah, I'll stand on a stack of books. That's great.

Yeah, and if we were any bookstore other than Powell's, there wouldn't be enough books. But luckily we're at Powell's. There are going to be plenty of books for you to stand on there.

But you can stand on the whole pink room if we need to do it that way. So yeah, I'll be about 45 minutes to an hour and the store is open till nine so you can wander around. We'll hang around and chat with people and see what's going on there. Okay, I'm sure we'll be mentioning it over the next couple of weeks as we get there. But this is our big splash because the link is available in the show notes, bookriot.com slash listen. Yeah, thanks so much for that for everyone. All right, news of the week. So the big news we touched on a little bit.

is that Hulu canned the ACOTAR adaptation. For those of you who are not acronym familiar enough with A Court of Thorns and Roses, that is the kind of the, I don't know what you would call this, where it is, but like the Yarros is the big mover right now. Like it's just selling more copies. It's really broken through in a different kind of way. But this series has been around for 10 years or I don't even know what book we're on. I think five or six. We could be in a different trilogy now. I'm not even sure.

The Masaverse is powerful and sprawling. And in our adaptation show, we sort of talked about this as breakthrough potential. To become a Tolkien, a Rowling, a Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, you need a big one. That's the difference between the people that are book famous and cultural franchises that endure at least for several decades, if not now. Yeah.

And I got to think that one of these romantics is going to get a crack at the pinata. I said on that show, it'd be very unusual in the history of publishing phenomenons of this scale not to have at least a bad attempt at adaptation. So the news here is that it's canned. The question I asked to you, Rebecca, is if you were an executive at one of these streamers and you had the budget –

A, would you take a crack at one of these two Romantis series writ large? Like, do you think you would try it? And if so, why? And if no, why? And then the second one would be, would you take Moss or Yaros? So that's your differential. I'm coming to you as, you know, I'm the executive and you're the development person. You've got the purse strings. Yeah.

No, no, it doesn't. You have the purse strings. I'm just a producer. I'm saying, okay, Rebecca, what are these? Are we going to do? Are we going to, I'm getting calls from all over the place. We need to have an answer on Romantic Z. Oh, well, you know how I hate to be in charge of things. Yeah, I know. That's right. That's right. It's like, this is like, is that my birthday? Let's see. I would take the Yaros. I would take it for movies. I think developing these as TV series is a mistake on a couple of fronts.

That's a much... It's a longer running endeavor. It's more production if you're going to do eight or ten episodes per book, like one season per book, eight or ten episodes per book. And you really... I mean, in both cases, movie or TV, you're counting on the audience being with you for a while. I think Hulu made the right call here with the Sarah J. Maas. Like, the...

stuff is starting to cool. They had not started production. You said that before Onyx Storm and it became the best-selling hardcover that Sir Connor's ever seen. Okay. It seems like the ACOTAR stuff is settling down. So this is cooling. I don't know what heat up's looking at. Okay. I don't think I would take ACOTAR.

Because it's not the big one. I think you get one big one, as you were saying, like you get Game of Thrones and then everybody else is the people trying to ride the Game of Thrones coattails. So I would take Eros, but I would have tried to take it right after Fourth Wing started popping and produce very quickly, if possible, which is not necessarily possible because there was a lot of special effects. We talked about all the dragons and all the things that

That would go into this. And then I think you try to put the fourth wing movie out right before the second book comes out. You try to put the second book's movie right before Onyx Storm comes out. So wait, we're going back in time? What's happening? This is a real question. You're like building. Your oat milk latte that you made me get at 6 a.m. is cold in my hand.

And you're talking about what you would have done two years ago. But you're building on that momentum. But you're building on the momentum, right? What are you doing right now? What are you doing right now? Oh, what am I doing right now? Right now. I guess I'm probably still taking the Eros and I'm going to produce the first movie with an option on the rest of them. But I don't want to commit to having to produce a separate movie for all five because I'm not sure if...

that there's going to be interest sustained for that in like seven to 10 years when the fifth movie would be done. Because that's five movies. Yeah. And she hasn't even started writing the fourth book yet. Well, there you go. That's a big question. I don't think we're in a George R.R. Martin situation, but you know what? There wasn't even such thing as George R.R. Martin situation before George R.R. Martin, so I don't know about that. She pumped out the first three and she has said, I think not exaggerating, that getting Onyx Storm out as quickly as she did almost killed her.

So it's going to be a while before we get the fourth book. Almost killed her? I think she might be exaggerating, but it was very difficult. Yes, very difficult. So yeah, I would take Fourth Wing. I would try to get it done pretty quickly. And then you hope that you're going. You know, hold on to the options for the other four books.

But I don't think you commit to we're going to make all five of them. I don't know enough about the deal milking to say if you answered the question correct. I mean, maybe that's something that we do. It doesn't seem, I guess I'll say this. It doesn't seem like the bidders are lining up. I'm in charge, I can make an offer.

Yeah, right. That was the offer you make. But if you're saying, okay, you're committing to, again, they're not going to make you pay a billion dollars, but I want my 3% of the production budget, no matter if you make the movies or not, that's $30 million against a billion dollars. Because five movies at $150 million plus marketing, you're looking at a billion dollar commitment.

Right. You could be. But like in the case of ACOTAR here, Disney has the rights to the series through the summer of this year. So it's going to be mid-summer 2025 before Sarah J. Maas can make a deal with any other studio. And then at least two years before Disney.

could exist. And then you're mid... Like, at best, you're mid-2027 and the first book in the series is already 12 years old. Yeah. I mean...

Let's try to think of... I mean, there's really only one series, and we don't like talking about the boy who lived by the woman who shall not be named. But those movies did start coming out before the books were done. But it wasn't as long as this would be. I think those were 2001 and the books were 97 when the first book came out. And I think those were a different beast in another important way because they were...

like they did hit all four quadrants. They were family experiences. And so you might have one person in a household who had read the books or as was my experience, like one of my partner's best friends in college had read the first book. None of us had read them yet. And he was like, this movie is coming out. I think you guys will like it. We went to see it. And that is how I found my way into the books. Like the first movie made me into a reader. It's possible that a fourth wing book or a fourth wing movie might be

attract some viewers who haven't read the books and then turn them on to the rest of the series. But I don't know how much ceiling is left for that. If you've been hearing about it for two years on TikTok and you haven't picked it up yet, are you going to be that interested in going to the movie?

When you don't know that much about it or you know enough to know you're not that into it. I don't know. I think there's so many books out there that that kind of doesn't matter the marginal person in that regard. I think it's I think the movie question is a good one. Like there's things have been I mean, Game of Thrones was much smaller of a book than Onyx Storm. Yeah, by far. And then it was good and it struck a chord and lightning in the bottle is not a business plan, as has often been said or some version of that. But you've got awareness and attention here.

I think your point about the quadrants is the one that I'm stuck on, and I'm guessing Hulu is maybe even stuck on for this one because I think both of these, I know less about A Court of Thorns and Roses. I have had the experience of reading Fourth Wing, so I do know. These shows want to be on HBO. These are R-rated enterprises, and they're not really Hulu jams in this particular regard. And I'm not sure that they're filmed. An R-rated fantasy franchise would be a first. I think this is like...

Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones. You need to show some skin and people's heads are going to get chopped off. Like that is tough in the movie theater. I think it's only it's HBO or bust for either of these.

Yeah. And the pitch of like, it's so spicy. I think it gets watered down when you take it to the theater. Because as you've pointed out, like the descriptions in the book are really graphic because she is like, Yeros is describing who's doing what to who else's body parts and how that's feeling. And then lightning's coming out of your fingers and it's great. And you don't get typically like that kind of narrated voiceover of a sex scene in a movie. You just see some, you see that sex is happening.

And there are ways to shoot and imply that like, this is a hot moment these people are having, but it won't be this like spicy descriptiveness that happens in the book or like the zooming in on any certain parts or anything to indicate who's touching what, like that would be porn to, to graphically depict what's on the page would require porn. And they're not going to do that. Like nobody's actually looking for that. The difference between reading it and seeing it in front of your face is pretty remarkable. And,

So I don't know how much appeal that holds. Like if you're maybe if you just really like the tension in the story or if you like the sci-fi tropes that are coming up, as a lot of folks have said, they really enjoyed all the sci-fi and fantasy tropes primarily that come up. And you want to see that just the dynamic between the characters play out and like the Hunger Games of it all. That might be fun.

But the big selling point is this is so spicy. And I think what you get on screen is like the door slams. They back up against the wall. There are sounds of moaning lightning. OK, enough. Thank you very much. Yeah, that's we're already past where I want to be doing right now. But I know I know what you mean.

You know, like that's, it's not the same as like the pages long descriptions of what's happening. I just don't know that that actually people would go to see it. The people who love these books would go to see them. But I just don't know that it's like the actual experience that they're looking for. I don't think and you can't take your kids. I mean, the Marvels, the Wicked, like the big, you can't take your kids to that. So I don't think, yeah, I hear what you're saying about the theater, but I think it doesn't work because it costs too much money.

And the kind of marketing and special effects. And I frankly don't think HBO is going to take it because they already have a dragon show with like people naked and doing weird stuff. It costs so much money and there would be so many episodes. Like, I mean, ultimately this was not the opportunity, the option you gave me, but like, I think if I were given a, like, would you want to make a deal on a romantic rather than you pick one? I think I would have just said, no, like I'm not going to make that. No, no, no, no one is an option. Oh, okay. That's kind of where I ended up too, frankly, in doing this. Yeah.

I don't see how I roll the dice. Because even if I get to say which studio, you can be the head of any studio, which do you pick? You kind of run through them. And I think HBO is the only option. But they've got a dragon show with people getting freaky on it. It's weird to say out loud.

It's dragon riders who do it. Like that's what we've been calling it all along. And then beat each other to a pulp and near death. Ooh, flight club. They could call it flight club. Anyway. So like I, I, I thought this might be, I think we may not see these. That's where I got. I think we may not see these. I think Hulu made the right call. And this also like sets a precedent because the Euro stuff, as far as we know, like it hasn't been cast. It's not in production. Um,

It's theoretically possible for that studio...

to back out as well. And they may be seeing this happening. Like you can see that happening and say either great, they're clearing the way for us or, oh, maybe we've made the wrong call too. Right. Yeah. I think it's really fascinating because you look, again, I kind of went through the studios or the streamers, right? Like what Netflix isn't going to do. I mean, again, there is a defang the hell out of it version, which maybe if I had to do something, I think I defang it.

If I have to do something and I make it into a theatrical run, that's what I do. The theatrical run, I think, is the only option. You have to figure out a way to make a PG-13. Or barring that, you find a streamer that's okay. And the only one that really is, is HBO. And even some of that stuff that HBO got away with in the early seasons of Game of Thrones in terms of explicitness. I know we're in a different administration, but I do think we've moved on from what we are...

writ large willing to put up with on screen like that. A lot of that stuff that got filmed the first two seasons doesn't get filmed that way today. There's that and also that, I mean, I think this is a really interesting contradiction in Gen Z media consumption. Like Gen Z is driving a lot of the romanticist reading and they like the spicy books, but Gen Z media consumers want less sex on TV and movies. So,

Does that apply here? Are they happy to read it, but they don't want to see all this fourth wing stuff on screen? Or is this because it's so popular because it is here and they don't want to see it on screen? Like, is it chicken and the egg or yin and yang or what? Right. Or would fourth wing be an exception where like, I don't normally want to see explicit sex on screen, but I'll go do that. I'll see it for fourth wing. Like, right. Or is it, I don't like it on screen, so I'm migrating to books for, you know, erotic material. It's really interesting. Right.

Yeah, so I think the prediction markets on one of these two big romantic things getting a big adaptation took a real hit. I mean, it sounds dumb to say, but I think this is indicative of more of a problem than anything else. Hulu's had some hits, and they're part of Disney, and they've got the money, but the other piggy banks, Amazon and Apple, they're not going to touch this with the NC-17-ish situation they have there. And I'm sure the price isn't cheap either, you know, just to make the whole thing. That's a real commitment, and we haven't seen...

I mean, it's Dune, right? I mean, you look at Dune and it's like, could you Dune this? Oh. Somehow. Like make it more highbrow? Like you make it more...

Maybe I'm wish casting now. You're wish casting? Yeah. I don't think you want that, though. Dune already was pretty spare, and a lot of it's there in Dune that's on the speech. It means a desert, of course. It's already an allegory. Yeah, that's right. Whereas Fourth Wing I don't think is an allegory for anything. Nothing subtle happening on Fourth Wing. No, nothing subtle happening there. Okay, speaking of nothing subtle, when you release the first image of your Odysseus...

And you're just Damon wearing a horsemane helmet. It's like, okay, all right. Got it. Noted. Ready. We're going to missionary position this adaptation. That is what's happening here. Listen, hot Greek summer. The countdown is already on. You used three exclamation points in the headline here. What else to say about this? I'm not sure I have anything else. So it's going to be Damon as Odysseus. It's going to be in ancient Greece. That's all that we know.

It's going to be long, almost definitely. They're using the word epic. I mean, the book is epic, but I don't know how you get the Odyssey on screen for less than three hours, honestly. Listen, if ever you were. I mean, between the Brutalist having an intermission and Nolan having the success he had with the long-ass Oppenheimer, we might be in serious heat check, Nolan. This could be a real...

A little too much slack on the line for Nolan to do whatever. You think this is going to be like Ridley Scott's four and a half hour director's cut of Napoleon? Robert Altman's Popeye?

Were they built a village in Malta that's still there, by the way? One of the great disasters. Wow, that's bonkers. If we were going to bet on it today, I would bet at least three hours for this. And Damon is just the first of the, we've seen a list of cast that have been announced, but not the roles that they'll be playing. So I think we said on a previous episode, Tom Holland is also in this.

My previous guess, and the thing I was really hoping for, was Tom Holland as young Odysseus, Damon as older Odysseus. I think this tells us Holland is very likely going to be Telemachus. But we don't know who Lupita Nyong'o is going to be. We don't know who Zendaya is going to be. Anne Hathaway is in this. I think now my money is on Anne Hathaway as Penelope. No, Theron. I would bet. Oh, Charlize Theron. Oh, yeah, that's right. She's closer to Damon's age. Yeah.

We have all kinds of people screwing with Odysseus parts for those ladies. Nwongo, Zendaya. We've got Circe, Calypso. We've got Sirens. We've got all sorts of stuff. It's going to be so great. That's going to be really interesting to see. Yeah, there's a part of me like this is the Nolan's Baroque era, which this could turn into a Coppola-like, you know. It could. I'm not sure. Though I will say.

the Odyssey, you've got good material and he, it will look amazing no matter what. It will. It will look amazing here. Yeah. I'm interested in like, are they going to lift the dialogue straight from the book? And if,

But what's straight from look like? They're not speaking Greek. Yeah, okay, there you go. Right, yeah. Whose translation? Or will it be more like The Return, which took the storyline but wrote their, you know, like they're not speaking in like any kind of poem situation. No one's not going to do that. I don't think he's going to do that either. Because he wants this to be accessible. Like this, Nolan is shooting for highbrow,

Like not four quadrant because you're not taking the little kids, but like a highbrow summer blockbuster coming out July 17th. Like that's right smack in the middle. I didn't know I wanted this until you just said something adjacent to it. What if Nuongo is like the narrator who's saying like verses, introductions to the various to kind of connect the things together? Yeah.

That she's a or anyone that would be a great voice. Yeah. So we're going to put together the hot Greek summer syllabus for anybody who wants to come hang out with us doing that next year. But I think like we're going to do maybe some Circe. We'll read the Odyssey together. You've pitched. Oh, brother, where art thou? I'm deeply on board for that.

See where else we get. See where else we can go. I think that's enough. That's enough to build out a nice halo of Odyssey-themed things to keep us going. That's right. That's right. I guess kind of meeting the middle of Dragonautica and literary adaptation is Miranda July and Stars with a Z are going to adapt All Force. And...

Godspeed and good luck to the Enterprise. This seems like a tough hang, but, but, well, what do you think?

Well, I think that it could go several ways. Very good. The book has a lot of teeth. And we were just talking about how the Night Bitch adaptation really watered down the story. I don't know how you could water down all fours. It's deeply weird in points. So I think there are scenes that will be...

potentially really great. I want to see how a set dresser does the weird ass hotel room that this character makes over time. That's going to be fun to watch. I want to see who they cast for it. But also some of the most memorable scenes in the book are pretty graphic and also in the fourth wing zone of I don't think they're going to actually show it on screen. I saw comments somewhere were like,

what are they going to do with there's, there's a scene with a tampon. And I was like, Oh God, I had memory hold that. And also I needed to go back. Yeah. It was a much more recent read for you. For this one. I actually think you can do less of the explicit stuff because so much of it is about her being adrift sort of existentially adrift. And you can do the relationship between the two characters and,

That's the talking, yearning, looking each other across truck stop stuff. Yeah. A lot of very meaningful interpretive dance. Yeah. What do you think about the scene where she narrates to the other woman what she wants to happen and then they do it to each other? Do you think that's going to be a whole... Is it a three-episode arc or a six-episode arc, that scene? Yeah.

I think you get like two minutes of that and like, oh, I wish that people could see you squirming just thinking about it. There's not a chair big enough to take the kinds of body contortions I'm doing right now. I,

I think that maybe you get like the first few sentences of that and then like a fade away if they do that at all. This piece about it in Vulture, this was kind of all over the place, but Fran Hefner wrote about it for Vulture and did a little potential casting. And the first thing was she was like, well, I guess Miranda July could play the main character. And that had not occurred to me. And I need that not to happen. We can't do that. We're not doing that. No, we cannot do that.

One of the things that makes the book such a hit is that so many women related to the character's story. And Miranda July is not widely relatable. Like, not if you're trying. She's just not. But Katherine Hahn gets floated in this piece. Like, Katherine Hahn would be kind of great. Like, she can do zany. She can definitely do, like, angsty and high strung stuff.

She's willing to put her body on the line and kind of go all in for an interesting role. And she did some of that in the Tom Parada adaptation, Mrs. Fletcher, that she was in. So that would be interesting. I mean, there's no talk that she's attached to it, but somebody like that who's really kind of willing to go there. Yeah.

I think I'm really interested in seeing how this goes. I don't wish to reread all fours, but I'm very curious from a science perspective about how this adaptation goes. Yeah, I didn't really thought about the casting situation. I like Katherine Hahn quite a bit. I think there's something about this character, and maybe it's the Julyness, that reads as a little more...

Or Han is more of, I mean, she can do kind of condescending, but there's sort of an intellectual and cultural arrogance about this person. Yeah. That I don't really, like, weirdly, I mean, I'd like Theron for it, weirdly. Like, she kind of has a magisterial quality. Like, she seems imposing. Also,

Amy Adams would have been good for this. Like the character in Night Bitch is an artist, thinks that she's not like the other moms because she comes from that like highbrow art world. I think she could have been interesting there, but she just did a movie like this. So I don't think we'll get Amy Adams. It's going to, and like stars, I don't know how racy stars is willing to be. They did Outlander, which I understand is lots of sex, but I don't know how graphic. I was like, I could name one series on stars with a Z. Yeah.

Right. Which is also like, are you that excited when your adaptation is coming out from Starz? I think in this day and age, yeah. I think you are. Especially with a literary novel like this. Like it's better than no adaptation at all. We still don't have a Jonathan Franzen adaptation, not even on Starz with a Z. Yeah, but Meryl Streep has been cast in one. What is the chance? Is that greater than a 21% chance of actually happening?

I need to believe so. Yeah, that's a no. You just said a no right there. That's a no. Give a girl some wish casting. Let me have a look. We're going to get into legal land here in a second, but I missed this news the other day until you put it in the agenda that N.D. Stevenson's latest book, Creator of Pneumonia,

is coming out and he says it's been his constant companion throughout his life. 15 years working on, it's called Scarlet Morning.

Two orphans. Oh, weird. Orphans in a fantasy setting. Well, there's two of them this time. I mean, a crew of pirates on a world-saving journey, touching what it means to be a kid, inheriting a world that's been fundamentally broken by adults who came before you. Hmm. On the nose, maybe. It's got the... I think he wrote and drew this, because it very looks like Nimona. I don't actually remember on original two. It was a 600-page draft originally. I'm guessing it's not going to be that. Wow.

So anyway, that's the news there. I'm sure. Let's see. It's September. I wonder if this is a good, this would be an interesting conversation to have. I wonder, uh,

What interesting things I can get him to Andy Stevenson. So that's going to be a big release. I think there's a lot of goodwill towards this. There is a multiple like middle grade YA into adult fantasy readers and of comics. Yeah, really cool. It looks cool. My kids, there will be a copy of this in my house. I can guarantee you that. Yeah. And it took a long time between the book release of Nimona and the Netflix film adaptation. And they're quite different. Yeah.

They are quite a bit different. And the wild robot is doing so well right now. And it's in that zone that like this same reader and like a family friendly story zone that we're talking about that now I'm rooting for there to be an adaptation announcement about this before the book is even out. And like, let's get the movie going while the wild robot is still hot. I want to go to the theater and see Scarlet Morning.

Yeah, prizes. The LA Times Book Prize finalists are out.

Let's see. These are just finalists. They have a first fiction award, which I always like to see, Cinema Love by Jemaine Tang, which got a lot of talk earlier in the year, but then kind of, I don't know, didn't do as well. Pepe Aguda's Ghost Roots continues to be hot. Joseph Earl Thomas' God Bless You, Otis Spokemeyer, which you've talked about before, and a couple books I haven't heard of, or at least had forgotten, Jessica Emerson's Olive Days and Julia Zabel's

Biascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here. I'm skipping the Achievement in Audiobook Production because that's famous. People read books and I'm not here for any more reification of that. If we go down to fiction, very cool. We see Everett or James. Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman. You're all fours. Janine Capo-Cruset's Say Hello to My Little Friend, which I can only assume is Al Pacino fan fiction. And then Rita Bullwinkle's Headshot, which is awesome.

Awesome. They have a mystery thriller category. Smart Money stays on Percival Everett. Yeah. They've got some genre. They've got young adult. It's a good lineup. It's worth perusing to see. Current Interest is a category, which kind of blends cultural, political, environmental things all in the same time. You get The Coats and you get Robin Wall Kimmerer in the same category, which unless you generally have a nonfiction category, you are not going to see that happen.

Very often, very cool awards. As always, I would expect James to take the fiction prize, which is the big picture. The ceremony is April 25th. So this is I believe that's after the Pulitzers will be announced. So could be the end of the Percival Everett season long sweep.

Good luck to everybody. Glad to see it. I really love the first fiction thing. Yes, he's getting a Lifetime Achievement situation. A Lifetime Achievement Award. Yeah, that's right. Has the book out, Heart of Stillness, which we really like. And this is a good time to say, hey, you know what? Let's recognize them while they're still around. You can find a link to register to come to see us at Powell's March 13th.

You can find the show notes there as well. There will also be links for our sub stack, our Instagram, the Patreon, first edition. It's all there. It's all great. Great stuff going on over here. Oh, you can email podcast at bookriot.com. I'm sure there's something I ask people to email about. I always like to listen to emails. I enjoy it. I really do at this point. Talk to us. Let us know. All right, Rebecca, we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks so much for listening today. Please enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of Beartooth by Callan Wink. Thanks to our sponsors at Spiegel and Grau by Spotify Audiobooks. Only a sliver of ice remained in the cooler, but the beer was so cold it made the back of his throat ache. Thad downed half a bottle in one gulp and then released a prodigious belch.

He'd stashed a bag of elk jerky in the truck, and they ripped and chewed the salty meat until their jaws hurt, washing it down with the beer, belching and yawning and stretching their arms and backs. They sat on the dropped tailgate, and Thad decided that instead of driving the maze of logging roads in the dark, they should just camp out one more night, handle the transaction out here in the woods tomorrow, and then head home after all the contraband had been transferred.

I'm going to start a fire. Hazen rummaged around in the cooler for another beer. He'd had four already, about as many as Thad ever liked him to have. Something about booze made Hazen argumentative, less pliant than he normally was. No fire. And you're done after that one. Find a spot to crash. Take your pack with you. Don't leave it in the truck. My sleeping bag is wet. I'm going to start a fire and dry it out. Why is your bag wet? I don't know. It just is.

Well, that's your own stupid fault. It's not that cold anyway. You'll be fine. You could have been airing it out this whole time instead of bitching and drinking all my beer. If I can't have a fire, then at least let me have another beer. He had finished his last one in three long drinks, half-chewed jerky still in his mouth. No fire, no more beer. Find a spot to crash, and I'll see you in the morning.

That's bullshit. One more beer, I'll pay you back. No. Why? You know why. Go sleep. Hazen took one more piece of jerky and reached for the cooler. Thad chopped his wrist down, and then Hazen slid from the tailgate and stomped off into the dark, dragging his pack behind him. Thad could hear the sound of breaking branches, incoherent muttering.

Thad got himself another beer and reclined against his foul-smelling pack and yawned. Hazen could be a royal pain in the ass. He probably should just forbid him from drinking at all. Last year, Thad had to pull him out from under a pack of firefighters who were intent on rearranging his face. He'd gotten a call from the bartender at the Blue Goose, who said he should probably get over there quick before Hazen got his neck broken.

By the time he arrived, Hazen had already talked his way into a pretty sizable ass-beating. It was a small town, and no local would have let Hazen get under his skin, but it was late summer, and there were wildfires burning all over in the mountains. Town was full of hotshot crews from down south. Fad never did find out exactly what Hazen had said.

When he got to the bar, three short, wide, Mexican-looking dudes were about to start applying their $300 whites to Hazen's skinny midsection. Luckily, Thad had been able to pull Hazen out and smooth things over. He bought drinks. He wasn't sure if the men spoke English. He pointed at Hazen and tapped his head, spiraling his finger around his ear. Loco, he said.

If he never had to go to town, Hazen would be just fine, Thad figured. Hell, during some era not too far past, Hazen would have probably been happier and more well-adjusted than Thad. He could have trapped, lived in the woods, got royally drunk once a year at some sort of mountain man rendezvous, and spent the next year working off his hangover, alone in the mountains, skinning beaver and talking to himself.