Amsterdam:

Sunday, May 19th (Whit Sunday):  12 – 18

Monday, May 20th (Whit Monday):  12 – 20

The Hague:

Sunday, May 19th (Whit Sunday):  closed

Monday, May 20th (Whit Monday):  12 – 18

ABC is hosting another official Magic the Gathering tournament on May 26th: The Two-Headed Giant sealed deck battle!

You’ll be playing with the three sets from the Retun to Ravnica Block: Dragon’s Maze, Gatecrash and Return To Ravnica.

Players sign up in pairs of two. Every 2-headed team receives 8 boosters so you are able to make two decks of 40 cards. Your team will play against a different two-headed team every round. You’ll be playing four rounds.

Per team we’ll enter 4 boosters in a prize pot. We’ll have some goodies to give away as well.

The ABC Treehouse opens at 11.30. The Tournament will start at 12.00.

• Date: Sunday, May 26th
• Place: ABC Treehouse, Amsterdam
• Time: 12 – 18.30 hrs
• Cost: € 35,- per team
• Special Note: Please reserve your team spot by making a reservation (here, top of the page, right) and please include your DCI number if you have one in the extra info section.
• Contact info: Jitse Verwer, jitse@abc.nl 020-6255537

It will be fun, so  join us for another Sunday full of Magic!

To read more on the Two Headed Giant format, click here.

On May 21st the program showcases Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open.

ABC pass holders get discount for this screening: € 7 instead of € 9!

Cracking the Frame

The Cracking the Frame series focuses on the creative intersection between art and film through experimental documentaries and cinematic portraits of the life and work of established contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers and global thinkers.

Each film is theatrically unreleased in The Netherlands and will be screened in English or with English subtitles.

Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open

Directed by Daniel Young; Switzerland, 2012, 93 min.

Among the most mysterious and charismatic counter-cultural icons of the past century, American writer and musician Paul Bowles was also one of the most influential.

Following the publication and immediate success of his first novel, “The Sheltering Sky”, Bowles moved to Tangier in 1949, refusing fame and disappearing from public life.

Tangier in the 40s and 50s was an exotic sanctuary for artists, writers and the wealthy to do as they pleased without fear of prosecution.

Openly homosexual, Paul Bowles was married to the lesbian writer Jane Bowles. A circle of heretic intellectuals began forming around them: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, the Beats and finally the Hippies all searched him out, lured by the mysterious and magical world he depicted in his books.

Using conversations with Bowles, interviews with numerous fellow companions, rare archive footage and original animations, Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open captures the daring and visionary life of a man and the extraordinary role he had in fuelling the imagination of generations of writers and liberal thinkers.

The screening is on Tuesday May 21st, 19.30 hrs at Rialto Amsterdam.

When a crime is committed in suburban Tel Aviv there is little need for a complex investigation. Police detective Avraham Avraham knows that, usually, the explanation is the simplest one. But when a sixteen-year-old boy vanishes without a trace, this theory is tested. The detective’s best lead seems to be the boy’s neighbour and tutor, Ze’ev Avni. He has information that does not only shed new light on the case, but could also make him a very likely suspect.

The Missing File is not a usual ‘whodunit’. The story isn’t really about the solution, it deals mostly with the relationships that develop during the course of an investigation and how there is no objective way of looking at the clues.

For this to work the author had to create human beings. They cannot be the standard all-knowing hero and quirky side-kick. With the minor characters D. A. Mishani did a good job, but when it came to the more complex main characters I think he just missed the mark. The detective’s mood swings faster than a pendulum and by the end of the book you still don’t know what kind of person he is. The teacher was slightly better crafted. It seemed like the author had given him more thought and knew what he wanted from him.

I don’t mind it too much when characters are not yet fully ‘developed’, personally, I can read past this. The thing that I couldn’t read past, and which kept throwing me off, was the way the story was told. First, the story is told in dual perspectives. This is not the problem. It keeps the reader on his toes and involved. But on top of these dual perspectives, parts of the story are told in flashbacks, that just seem to pop up whenever they feel like it. This disrupted the flow of the story somewhat and several times I had to reread a page to figure out when I was reading about.

Having said all of this, I do have to add that I did like the book. Because it is not a conventional ‘whodunit’, it reads very differently from other detective stories. It’s a bit like a ‘behind the scenes’ novel. The storytelling was a bit flawed, but this is the author’s first book. It did intrigue me and I look forward to the follow-up.

You Review: The latest releases, reviewed by ABC customers.

• Awards! The 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Chris Beckett for Dark Eden.  See the nominees (as well as the other four big SF/Fantasy award nominees) here. This year’s Agatha Award (for traditional mysteries) for Best Novel went to Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery (Inspector Gamache #8).  Click here for the rest of the category winners.  Another award with many delicious categories is the James Beard Foundation Award, featuring all manner of cookbooks (oh, yeah!).  Cookbook of the Year went to Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America by Maricel E. Presilla.

• Interview! James Salter celebrates the publication of his first novel in over 30 years (All That Is) by talking to the Guardian.  They also feature one of Castle’s poker buddies, James Patterson, in their Life in Books series.  The Huffington Post interviewed Maya Angelou on the occasion of her latest Mom & Me & Mom.

• Did you celebrate Mother’s Day last Sunday? In case it all got a little too sugary for you, here are The 10 Worst Mothers in Books.  See it as an antidote.

• The ever-insightful Lionel Shriver writes a strong essay about the West’s obsession with body size. Time to pick up her newest, Big Brother (which continues the essay’s theme), then!  Speaking of essays-tying-in-with-new-novels, William Sutcliffe explains how a visit to the West Bank Wall changed his new novel.

• The NY Times highlights a few children’s book apps (including Miffy).

• Lists! As ever, Flavorwire has bunches, including Writers Inspired by Dreams, The Fascinating Stories Behind Classic Book Titles, and Publishers’ Craziest Schemes to Avoid Book Spoilers (thank you, Dan Brown’s Inferno).

• A case of “It’s a book, people, not the end of the world!“

• John Green fans! Here’s some casting news on the The Fault in Our Stars movie.  HuffPost also has a slideshow with upcoming/recently-released YA books-to-movies.

• And finally: Coverflip, or how the gender of the author might translate onto the book cover.  Long live author Maureen Johnson’s twitter followers, eh? 

Thanks to PeterL and Aviva for some of the above links!

Jeff is a teenager who just has moved to a new high school, an elite school with school uniforms, rich kids and a good reputation.

But on his first day the trouble starts, as the first person he actually meets there is a girl. Well, he doesn’t meet her first, but he stumbles more or less upon her as she is lying in the school corridor. It is the ghost of a dead girl, Kimberlee, who was quite notorious at school because was a kleptomaniac and stole everything that she could get her hands on. Jeff is the only one who can see her, and can talk with her, which leads to some bizarre situations, of course. Not every teen in school understands it when he seems to be talking into the air. Kimberlee is convinced that the reason she’s a ghost and hasn’t moved on is because she needs to return all the stuff she’s ever stolen, and she asks Jeff to help her with this so she can move on to the afterlife. Jeff learns how to dress and be noticed with the popular kids with extensive coaching from Kimberlee. As their odd friendship grows, Jeff is making new friends and relationships at school while returning the things that were stolen by Kimberlee and hoping he doesn’t get caught. But then Jeff falls in love with a girl from his new school: Sera. Will Jeff help Kimberlee move on before she wrecks his life? Or has he gotten himself in too deep?

What surprised me about Life After Theft was that it was completely written from Jeff’s point of view, something I truly didn’t expect as, when I see the cover, this looks like a young adult book aimed at girls. I found this very refreshing and very original! The plot was fun and exciting although it didn’t have much depth, but then I didn’t really expect that. The main plot thread was that Kimberlee fulfilled her unfinished mission to give back the stolen goods, and that was kind of a message of making wrong things right again.

This book was also something completely new by Aprylinne Pike after her Wings series. It was completely different. The characters were good: Jeff thinks at first that he has gone completely crazy when he discovers that Kimberlee is actually a dead girl which he can communicate with. His character was very realistic, and he was really a good guy. Kimberlee was a little bit hard to follow sometimes. She was a bad girl who had regrets about what she did, but she still had a spunky streak as a ghost. It was overall a very entertaining read, with lots of hilarious moments and with an original plot that was quite different from every other YA novel I have read so far. I recommend it!!

You Review: The latest releases, reviewed by ABC customers.

Please be sure to contact our stores for an exact stock check!

The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian – Jack Campbell

Admiral Geary’s First Fleet of the Alliance has survived the journey deep into unexplored interstellar space, a voyage that led to the discovery of new alien species, including a new enemy and a possible ally.

Now Geary’s mission is to ensure the safety of the Midway Star System, which has revolted against the Syndicate Worlds empire – an empire that is on the brink of collapse. To complicate matters further, Geary also needs to return safely to Alliance space not only with
representatives of the Dancers, an alien species, but also with Invincible, a captured warship that could possibly be the most valuable object in human history.

Despite the peace treaty that Geary must adhere to at all costs, the Syndicate Worlds regime threatens to make the fleet’s journey back grueling and perilous. And even if Geary escorts Invincible and the Dancers’ representatives safely unharmed, the Syndics’ attempts
to spread dissent and political unrest may have already sown the seeds of the Alliance’s destruction…

You – Austin Grossman

When Russell joins Black Arts games, the hottest studio in the game industry, he meets an eccentric crew of nerds hacking the frontiers of both technology and entertainment. But when their revolutionary next-gen game is threatened by a mysterious software glitch, Russell finds himself in a race to save both his job and the people he has grown to care about.

The bug is the first clue in a mystery leading back twenty years through real and virtual worlds, corporate boardrooms and high school computer camp, to a secret that changed a friendship and the history of gaming.

You is a thrilling, hilarious, authentic portrait of the world of professional game makers; and the story of how learning to play can save your life.

The Shining Girls – Lauren Beukes

The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in this story of a time-traveling serial killer who is impossible to trace–until one of his victims survives.

In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back. Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.

The Shining Girls is a masterful twist on the classic serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing girl in pursuit of a deadly criminal.

Crucible of God – Naomi Novik

Will Laurence and his fighting dragon Temeraire once again taking to the air against the broadsides of Napoleon’s forces and the friendly – and sometimes not-so-friendly – fire of British soldiers and politicians who continue to suspect them of divided loyalties, if not outright treason.

For Laurence and Temeraire, put out to pasture in Australia, it seems their part in the war has come to an end just when they are needed most. Newly allied with the powerful African empire of the Tswana, the French have occupied Spain and brought revolution and bloodshed to Brazil, threatening Britain’s last desperate hope to defeat Napoleon.
So the British government dispatches Arthur Hammond from China to enlist Laurence and Temeraire to negotiate a peace with the angry Tswana, who have besieged the Portuguese royal family in Rio – and as bait, Hammond bears an offer to reinstate Laurence to his former rank and seniority as a captain in the Aerial Corps. Temeraire is delighted by this sudden reversal of fortune, but Laurence is by no means sanguine, knowing from experience that personal honor and duty to one’s country do not always run on parallel tracks.
Laurence and Temeraire – joined by the egotistical fire-breather Iskierka and the still-growing Kulingile, who has already surpassed Temeraire in size – embark for Brazil, only to meet with a string of unmitigated disasters that leave the dragons and their human friends forced to make an unexpected landing in the hostile territory of the Inca empire, where they face new unanticipated dangers.
Now with the success of the mission balanced on a razor’s edge, and failure looking more likely by the minute, the unexpected arrival of an old enemy will tip the scales toward ruin. Yet even in the midst of disaster, opportunity may lurk – for one bold enough to grasp it.

Alien in the House – Gini Koch

Jeff and Kitty Katt-Martini have learned the ins and outs of Washington politics, not to mention how to prevail in intergalactic war and foil any variety of dangerous conspiracies. So when the newly elected Representative from New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District dies under mysterious circumstances while at the Centaurion Embassy, it’s up to Kitty and the rest of the Diplomatic Corps to find out how and why and stop the killer, before the rest of the U.S. House of Representatives become casualties, particularly the replacement Representative for New Mexico’s 2nd District—Jeff Martini.

Necessary Evil – Ian Tregillis

12 May 1940. Westminster, London, England: the early days of World War II.
Again.

Raybould Marsh, one of ‘our’ Britain’s best spies, has travelled to another Earth in a desperate attempt to save at least one timeline from the Cthulhu-like monsters who have been observing our species from space and have already destroyed Marsh’s timeline. In order to accomplish this, he must remove all traces of the supermen that were created by the Nazi war machine and caused the spectors from outer space to notice our planet in the first place.
His biggest challenge is the mad seer Greta, one of the most powerful of the Nazi creations, who has sent a version of herself to this timeline to thwart Marsh. Why would she stand in his way? Because she has seen that in all the timelines she dies and she is determined to stop that from happening, even if it means destroying most of humanity in the process. And Marsh is the only man who can stop her. Necessary Evil is the stunning conclusion to Ian Tregillis’s Milkweed series.

Generation V – M.L. Brennan

Fortitude Scott’s life is a mess. A degree in film theory has left him with zero marketable skills, his job revolves around pouring coffee, his roommate hasn’t paid rent in four months, and he’s also a vampire. Well, sort of. He’s still mostly human.

But when a new vampire comes into his family’s territory and young girls start going missing, Fort can’t ignore his heritage anymore. His mother and his older, stronger siblings think he’s crazy for wanting to get involved. So it’s up to Fort to take action, with the assistance of Suzume Hollis, a dangerous and sexy shape-shifter. Fort is determined to find a way to outsmart the deadly vamp, even if he isn’t quite sure how.

But without having matured into full vampirehood and with Suzume ready to split if things get too risky, Fort’s rescue mission might just kill him….

For three days only, on May 6th, 7th and 8th, Deborah Davis’s The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy will be only € 7,50!

This offer is only valid while supplies last, and only on those three days, in both our stores. On May 9th the price goes back to € 15,99 (or € 55,50 if all our bargain stock is sold).

We won’t be taking reservations for this title, either; this is a one-off blitz bargain deal so come grab your copy! We’re sure you’ll be able find other sale gems while you’re visiting…

You can also sign up for our bargain mailing here.

May the 4th be with you (oh, so punny!). 

To celebrate this most auspicious of days, we are giving away five (5!) Star Wars books, thanks to the lovely folks at Random House.  The books you can win are:

All you need to do is answer one little question for us:

Which Star Wars book or book series is your all-time favorite?

Mail your answer to win@abc.nl by noon on Thursday, May 9th, using “Star Wars Day” in the subject header.  Let us know which book you would like to win (best have a second or third choice available, too) and at which ABC you would like to collect it.

The winners will be mailed Thursday afternoon on May 9th.  They will be posted here on the blog, together with all your book suggestions, in the second half of May when blogmistress Sophie is back from her vacation.

Don’t think you’ll win?  Why, we find your lack of faith disturbing… 

Jurassic Park 3D (the 3D release of the 1993 box office smash hit)

is still based on the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (iconic cover by the amazing Chip Kidd).

Hannah Arendt is a biographical film about the German Jewish philosopher. It isn’t based on any specific book,

but there are quite a few books about her, the times she lived in and her work, like The Portable Hannah Arendt.

Two Mothers is based on the short story The Grandmothers by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.

The Great Gatsby is based on the classic written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  If you haven’t read it yet, do!  Glorious use of language. 

The Company You Keep is based on the novel with the same title by Neil Gordon.

L’Ecume des Jours is based on the French novel with the same title by Boris Vian.

It has been translated to English with the title Froth on the Daydream.

Epic is based on the novel The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs by William Joyce

(the same man who also wrote The Rise of the Guardians books).

Midnight’s Children is based on the modern classic by Salman Rushdie (originally scheduled for March).