Actor and author James Franco will direct film adaptations of William Faulkner‘s As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthy‘s Blood Meridian. The Faulkner film will begin production in summer 2011 and the McCarthy film will follow in 2012.

Franco (pictured, via) explained how he intends to deal with Faulkner’s rotating narrators to Entertainment Weekly: “I don’t believe it’ll feel the same if you divide it as rigidly as the book, like titles that say ‘Cash’ and then you’re with Cash. You can slip into the characters’ heads and give them their inner voice for a while, but it has to be more fluid because movies just work differently than books.”

In addition to publishing a short story collection last year, Franco took on the roles of poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl and memoirist Aron Ralston in 127 Hours. (Via Shelf Awareness)

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here’s more about Llosa (pictured, via) from the Nobel site: “[he was awarded] for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

UPDATE: eBookNewser has more about the author’s conspicuous lack of eBooks. Picador will reprint 10 paperbacks by the Nobel winner. Finally, Maud Newton points us to the novelist’s Charlie Rose interview.

In a 2002 Guardian interview, the novelist explained his commitment to writing: “The writer’s job is to write with rigour, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.”

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As gamblers enter the final day of betting on the Nobel Prize in Literature, the U.K. betting site Ladbrokes continues to adjust the odds. Cormac McCarthy currently leads the field with 5/2 odds of winning the prize.

Behind him are Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o with 7/2 odds and Japanese author Haruki Murakami with 6/1 odds. As we reported last week, the Nobel Prize announcement is set for tomorrow (October 7).

Take these odds with a grain of salt. Last year, Herta Müller beat some tough odds to win the 2009 prize–Ladbrokes had Israeli author Amos Oz as the 4 to 1 favorite. (Via Michael Orthofer)

As U.K. gamblers adjust the odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Cormac McCarthy has lept to the top of the heap with 3/1 odds of winning the world’s most prestigious literary prize.

At the Ladbrokes betting site, the experts are hard at work trying to predict a winner of the world’s most prestigious literary prize. At the same time, Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o saw his odds rise to 11/4 and the odds for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to win the prize rose to 9/1.

Yesterday, Betting Pro had more about the odds from Ladbrokes spokesman David Williams. He explained: “We’ve never seen anything like it. Ngugi was a rank outsider when we first looked at the candidates but we fear we’ve got it horribly wrong. Punters cant get enough of him and we’re dreading him being announced the winner.” (Via Michael Orthofer)

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (pictured) seeks to build his fictional  Museum Of Innocence as an actual museum. The museum will be located in Pamuk’s hometown Istanbul, Turkey, and he hopes to open before the end of 2010.

Turk Net Haber reports: “Pamuk has been carrying out the preliminary activities for the establishment of the museum in Istanbul’s Cukurcuma district for a long time. The museum is expected to make a poetic and documentary representation of the culture of Istanbul from 1950s until the present day, through various objects used in daily life, photographs, paintings and movies.”

In 2008, Pamuk published The Museum Of Innocence in Turkey. Maureen Freely handled the English translation and that came out in 2009 from Random House’s Alfred A. Knopf imprint. Freely has worked alongside Pamuk as the translator for five of his novels including The Black Book, Snow, Other Colors, Istanbul, and The Museum Of Innocence.

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Novelist Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road and Blood Meridian) received a huge boost from the betting site Ladbrokes over the weekend. He was given 8/1 odds to win the Nobel Prize in Literature as UK gamblers are hard at work trying to predict a winner of the world’s most prestigious literary prize.

At the same time, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o rocketed up the chart, gaining 6/1 odds as the October 7th announcement nears. Swedish author Tomas Transtromer still has the best chance with 4/1 odds. Japan’s Haruki Murakami and Autstralia’s Les Murray both have 11/1 odds of winning the prize.

Betting Pro has more about the odds from Ladbrokes spokesman David Williams. He explained: “We’ve never seen anything like it. Ngugi was a rank outsider when we first looked at the candidates but we fear we’ve got it horribly wrong. Punters cant get enough of him and we’re dreading him being announced the winner.” (Via Michael Orthofer)

Next month we hope to host the world’s longest literary remix, letting individual GalleyCat Reviews readers rewrite short passages from a piece of public domain fiction. UPDATE: There is still time to sign up. The writing challenge officially begins on Monday, May 3rd.

We were inspired by the Star Wars: Uncut project showcased in the video embedded above. The project divided the Star Wars film into snippets and gave hundreds of filmmakers the chance to re-shoot one 15-second scene. The surreal results made this GalleyCat editor giddy–one filmmaker substituted dogs for actors and another fan replaced a starship with a hamburger.

We want to do the same thing with a piece of public domain fiction from 19th Century–letting you rewrite a passage from the out-of-date story in your own unique style. You can turn a flowery Victorian soliloquy into a stark Cormac McCarthy scene; refurbish wooden dialogue with Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness style; or rewrite a dull description with technicolor Thomas Pynchon prose.

Please join us on this grand experiment. If people are interested, we will give out prizes of some sort (most likely books) and feature some individual entries on GalleyCat. We will repackage the final product into a free eBook (complete with illustrations) that you can share with the world. Every contributing writer will receive a byline and a short biography in the remixed book.

Are you in? Email us today with the subject line “GalleyCat Remix” and we will add you to the list of contributors. If enough people sign up, we will band together to remix a 19th Century bestseller full of cheesy adventure, purple prose, wooden dialogue, crazy sermons, and plenty of Bad Writing.

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Yesterday the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center acquired the archive of writer David Foster Wallace. The collection includes annotated books from the author’s bookshelf, like that scribble-filled copy (pictured, via) of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

The collection contains a vast sample of the late author’s writing life: poems, stories and letters he wrote as a young man; college writings and teaching materials; and “heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.” In addition, Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell (of the Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell agency), wrote a touching introduction to the collection.

Here’s more from Nadell: “[W]hat scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a ‘look ma no hands’ kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.”

In Amazon.com rankings for tie-in books, Cormac McCarthy‘s recently adapted novel, “The Road” and a tie-in book for James Cameron‘s Avatar currently lead the field.

Produced by HarperCollins’ It Books imprint, the new book, “Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora,” is meant to supplement the film–an original screenplay written by the director.

It was a blockbuster weekend for Avatar. During its opening weekend and a massive east coast storm, the film still earned about $73 million, according to Box Office Mojo estimates. That was the highest grossing opening weekend ever for a film that wasn’t directly adapted from a book or comic book.

Interestingly enough, seven of the ten films on the highest grossing opening weekend list originated as books or comic books. The blockbuster list includes: Shrek sequels, two Spider-Man films, The Dark Knight, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post miscounted the blockbuster list.

Today four adaptations of books scored five major awards from the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), moving one important step closer towards the Academy Awards.

The literary winners were: Meryl Streep won best actress for “Julie & Julia” (based on Julie Powell‘s memoir); Mo’Nique won best supporting actress for “Precious” (based on “Push” by Sapphire); George Clooney won best actor for “Up In The Air” (based on Walter Kirn‘s novel) and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (based on the book by Roald Dahl); and finally, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” took the best animated film award.

These wins can be crucial for a film’s award season. In 2007, the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s “No Country for Old Men” scored best picture, director and best supporting actor at the NYFCC awards–winning big at the Academy Awards that same year. eventual Oscar winners all. case you were wondering, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight Saga: New Moon did not take a single award.