On Nick Hornby’s An Education

I stopped by Amazon today, to check on the status of an order. Normally, I don’t look at the recommendations on the first page, though it did amuse me that Amazon was recommending that I buy a copy of Grand Designs, especially as I wrote the first story in the volume. 🙂

Today, however, I scrolled down the page. And Amazon told me there’s a new Nick Hornby book coming out, An Education. I clicked through, and Amazon couldn’t tell me what it was, except that it was coming out in October.

By the way, Hornby apparently is not popular with Amazon, as his books have received customer tags such as “disappointing,” “pointless,” “badly-written,” and “dorky.”

This bothers me, as I love Hornby’s writing. I love his sense of prose, the way he turns a phrase. High Fidelty rocked my world. (The movie, much less so.) Fever Pitch is wonderful, and I’ll quote from it at random. About a Boy and How to Be Good were fantastic. I am, I confess, a little behind on my Hornby-reading; I have Slam and A Long Way Down still on my To-Be-Read pile. This oversight on my part doesn’t mean I’m going to pass up An Education in October.

So, what it is?

A Hornby screenplay.

Hornby has written a screenplay about a young woman, about to go to university, who meets a man twice her age. The film stars a number of people, including Carey Mulligan, best known to Doctor Who audiences as Sally Sparrow.

Here’s a brief write-up about the film.

And the film’s trailer:

I’m not sure how wide a release this film will see. I suspect I won’t find it in Baltimore this October. I do intend to buy the screenplay, though, and I’ve no doubt this will be a blind-buy on DVD.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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