Itty-bitty Tom Cruise as a big action hulk?

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This article was published 17/6/2011 (3393 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the thought of 5-foot-7 Tom Cruise as action hulk Jack Reacher makes fans of Lee Child's novels recoil, it wouldn't be the first time Cruise has so inspired readers of an immensely popular series.

Hollywood trade website Deadline.com confirms that Cruise is negotiating to star in One Shot, an adaptation of the ninth Reacher novel. There are 15 Reacher books in total, having sold approximately 40 million copies.

Yet just as Anne Rice (eventually) gave her blessing to Cruise as the vampire Lestat in 1994's Interview With the Vampire, based on her 1976 bestseller, Child has already made a statement to assuage fans.

"Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Child said.

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Actor Samuel L. Jackson's uniquely profane persona has been tapped for the audiobook performance of Go the F**k to Sleep, the New York Times bestselling children's book parody.

Jackson appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman this week to read from the book; the audio version is available as a free download on Audible.com.

The 62-year-old Jackson is famous for cursing onscreen, as in the 2006 action movie Snakes on a Plane, in which he exclaims: "I have had it with these motherf--kin' snakes on this motherf--kin' plane!"

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Hell perhaps hath no fury like some women writers scorned.

In a June 2 interview with The Guardian in England, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul claimed that he considers no woman writer, even Jane Austen, his literary equal.

"And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he added.

In response, Booker Prize-winning author Keri Hulme (The Bone People) wrote a blistering comment on the New Zealand-based Beattie's Book Blog.

"V S Naipaul is a [sic] mysogynist pr--k whose works are dying," Hulme wrote. "Many thousand women writers both outrank, and will out-survive, this slug."

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Canadian-based Bell Media has optioned the TV rights for novels by three Canadian mystery writers and is working to adapt them to the small screen.

Bell, which owns CTV in addition to 29 other specialty channels, has bought dibs on William Deverell's Arthur Beauchamp series, Giles Blunt's Det. John Cardinal series and finally Robert Rotenberg's debut novel Old City Hall, reports the National Post.

Deverell is the creator of the CBC-TV series Street Legal.

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Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem's 1961 cult novel Solaris has now been directly translated into English for the first time by an Indiana University professor.

Adapted for the big screen by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by American auteur Steven Soderbergh in 2002, Solaris had previously been available in a 1970 English translation from a French version, which Lem considered poor, reports The Guardian.

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