Book Review: 'Sorry Please Thank You' By Charles Yu

Originally published on TheFlickcast.com.  15 Jan. 2013.

How do you follow a debut novel that was named one of Time magazine’s best books of the year? For Charles Yu the answer is Sorry Please Thank You, a breezy but fascinating collection of short stories.

In an interview during San Diego Comic-Con 2012, Yu revealed that the transition from writing his popular and widely praised book, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, to the short story format of Sorry Please Thank You was challenging. The author also admitted that not all of the stories turned out the way he had planned.

“Sometimes you write something and it’s just not what you thought it was going to be,” he said. Even so, Yu is pleased with the final product and readers will be too.

The collection of stories transports readers from futuristic earth to virtual reality and even into space. In every time and location the characters are searching for the same things: happiness and love. The fundamental nature of these desires helps keep Yu’s stories grounded even as some of them veer off into the more obscure and strange (an alien’s guide to Earth families, for example).

'Y: The Last Man' Finds a Director at Last

Originally published on TheFlickcast.com.  14 Jan. 2013.

It has been a long road for the film adaptation of the critically acclaimed comic series Y: The Last Man, but it finally looks like things are starting to progress. Dan Trachtenberg has been announced as the director of New Line Cinema’s feature film version of the award winning series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra.

A commercial director, Trachtenberg was the co-host of The Totally Rad Show alongside Jeff Cannata and the Nerdist Channel’s Alex Albrecht. He also gained viral fame for his fan-made trailer for Portal: No Escape, which has more than 11.6 million hits on YouTube. You can check that out after the break.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced this fantastic comic, Y: The Last Man takes place in a not too distant future where a mysterious plague has killed every male mammal on Earth except for a snarky amateur magician, Yorick, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The series won five Eisner awards and has been become beloved among the comic and literature communities alike.

In addition to Trachtenberg behind the camera, the movie adaptation has a script by Matthew Federman & Stephen Scaia. We can only hope everyone involved can do this epic story justice on the big screen.