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[Photo by Kate Macate on Unsplash]

Today is National Send a Card to a Friend Day! To celebrate this day, we imagined what letters fictional friends would send to each other. Just don’t think too hard about how the letters were delivered; we’re not quite sure how letters are sent to Oz or how Owl puts stamps on postcards.

Photo credit: Courtney Apple

Or, How Poets and Novelists Became Video Game Superstars

Originally published on Powells.com

One day in 1984, my father and I were walking through a K-mart, and we stopped to look at the video games. At the time, K-mart carried all the arcade hits that a 13-year-old boy might want – Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids – but the salesman at the counter asked if we’d seen Ray Bradbury’s new game.

[Movie still from The Lego Batman Movie, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation]

With The LEGO Batman Movie hitting theatres this week, we started wondering what other books would thrive under this specific adaptation treatment. After all, Batman started as a book too. And we’d be willing to bet that when DC Comics introduced Batman as a character in 1939, the furthest thing from their mind was a reimagining of their superhero using the interlocking bricks Danish toymakers were experimenting with. (Yeah yeah. We’re a bunch of pop culture history nerds. What did you expect?) Without further ado, here are four books that we’d love to see get the LEGO movie treatment. 

[Photo by NASA on Unsplash]

When we think of space operas—melodramatic adventures full of interplanetary battles with a little romance thrown in—we tend to think of sweeping franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. While there have been some space opera books (consider everything by Iain M. Banks, books by Robert Heinlein and Dave Simmons, and the countless Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica book adaptations), we wondered what would happen if we could see some of our favorite space opera movies turned into books.

Today is the day the music died. On February 3rd, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed in a plane crash.

And here's a spin on the classic song—Quirk author Erik Didriksen's sonnet version of "American Pie" by Don McLean. True skill. 

Find more of Erik's Shakepearean spins in his book Pop Sonnets and over on popsonnets.com.

[Featured book cover versions from Penguin Random House]

The Old Curiosity Shop II: Curiosity Never Dies

Dick Swiveller is trying to put his life together after the events of the first novel, but he’s haunted by the ghost of his fiancé—literally. Some souls are too good to stay dead, and so is Little Nell now an extra-dimensional presence only Swiveller can see.