Artists, take note: When in doubt about how to price your work, go high. ...

"Oh, hai." Still from No Country for Old MenThis week in new movies: A cornucopia of literary adaptations, special effects, and Javier Bardem. No Country for Old Men is FINALLY opening in Austin, and we couldn't be more excited (or strangely aroused by Bardem's "lost Beatle from hell" haircut and Wranglers ensemble.) Beowulf: Robert Zemeckis reprises the motion-capture animation technique he used in Polar Express and applies it to everyone's fave Anglo-Saxon epic poem. Ray......

Photo courtesy Richard Foreman/Miramax There is dark humor, and then there is the kind of humor in which a bone sticking out of a man’s arm qualifies as one of the lighter moments. No Country For Old Men, a film of dark beauty and sharp formal precision, is not a comedy by any stretch of the imagination; but, like the best films, it proves that an element of absurdity is necessary to chart the best......

Chris Garcia over at Austin360 has the scoop on an open casting call for the upcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road. They're looking for "white boys, ages 7-10, with a thin/slight build"—presumably this is to cast the role of the young son in the story, who accompanies his father (to be played by Viggo Mortensen) as they make their way across a ravaged post-apocalyptic America. The casting call will take......

It was announced today that Austin-based scribe Lawrence Wright was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. This is not the only award his book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has won, but it is one of the more illustrious honors it has received. Wright is currently a staff writer for the New York Times New Yorker, has written for Texas Monthly, and helped pen the screenplay for the Denzel......

The only thing we enjoy more than giving our own opinion is picking the nits in others’ opinions. So imagine our delight when The New York Times published the results of its survey of “prominent writers, critics, editors, and other literary sages” to select the best work of American fiction from the past 25 years. Oh, so many plump, juicy nits to pick! From what constitutes a “work” to how to define “best.” The......