Fifty Shades of Grey – The Movie

The casting decisions have been made and production will begin soon for the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Charlie Hunnam

Charlie Hunnam

Thirty-three year old Charlie Hunnam has been cast as Christian Grey.  He recently starred in the movie “Pacific Rim” and appeared in the FX series “Sons of Anarchy”.

Dakota Johnson

Dakota Johnson

Twenty-three year old Dakota Johnson has been cast as Anastasia Steele.  She is the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson.  She recently appeared in the short-lived Fox sit-com “Ben and Kate” and had roles in “The Social Network” and “The Five-Year Engagement”.

Focus Features will release the film on August 1, 2014. Sam Taylor-Johnson is directing the project.  It will be interesting to see if they can keep it ‘R’ rated or will they have to go to NC17?

Alexis Bledel

Alexis Bledel

Matt Bomer

Matt Bomer

UPDATE:  It seems not everyone is happy with the above choices.   Angry fans of the book are petitioning to have Alexis Bledel and Matt Bomer cast as the leads.  The petition has 20,000 signatures so far.

Author Profile: Bella Andre

bella andre

Bella Andre

New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Bella Andre is one of the rare self-published phenomenons who has become an ebook millionaire.   She recently signed a groundbreaking 7-figure print-only deal with Harlequin MIRA for her Sullivan series.  They will be released in mass market paperback in a global launch with continuous back-to-back releases from June 2013 to April 2014.

She started out writing songs, then non-fiction books.  When she wrote her first Romance novel, she knew she’d found her perfect career.  She’s a savvy marketer who works non-stop to improve the sales of her titles.  When she released her first original self-published story in July 2010, she wrote a personal email to everyone who had ever written to her in the last five years to get the word out.  She is known for her sensual stories with sizzling alpha heroes and strong women.

Besides writing, her favorite things to do are reading her favorite authors, hiking, and swimming.  She is married with two children and splits her time between Northern California and a 100 year old cabin in the Adirondacks.

Available (or soon to be) at our library:

Sullivan Brothers Series

The Look of Love

From This Moment On

Can’t Help Falling In Love

*Coming Soon*

I Only Have Eyes for You
If You Were Mine
Let Me Be The One
Come A Little Bit Closer
The Way You Look Tonight
Book 10    coming Fall 2013

Also Available:

Hot As Sin

Never Too Hot

Wild Heat

Ebook (Overdrive Catalog) – Candy Store

Anticipated Erotic Literature – My Education by Susan Choi

Susan Choi

One of the most anticipated books of 2013 is My Education by Susan Choi.  Susan is the author of three previous novels.  Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award.   American Woman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulker Award.

My Education is a steamy, but very well-written book.  It’s about Regina, a graduate student, who is warned about a notorious professor who sleeps with students.  She becomes his teaching assistant and, in a surprising twist, has an affair with the professor’s wife.  The story spans fifteen years of Regina’s misadventures that are both erotic and catastrophic.

This novel is Amazon’s best book of the month – July 2013.  It has received rave reviews from many sources, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus,  the Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Available at the Cheshire Library.

Note:  For sensitive readers, this book contains profanity, sexual references and overt sexual scenes.

Erotic Romance vs. Erotica

erotic fictionErotic fiction has been around for a very long time.  One of the most erotic pieces of poetry is the Song of Songs in the Bible.  The late 18th century brought us the French aristocrat, Marquis de Sade whose name gave us the sexual kink of “sadism”.  In the early 20th century, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer helped reform obscenity laws in the United States.  In the 1970’s there was a dramatic increase in erotic fiction with Fear of Flying, and My Secret Garden.  The 1980’s brought us Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.  Many new publishers were founded to keep up with the demand of erotic fiction.

Erotic romance gained more ground with the introduction of ebooks.  By the mid 2000’s when traditional romance publishers saw the interest in this genre, they launched imprints dedicated to the print publication of erotic romance.

There has always been a strong core of erotic romance readers, but with the introduction of the Fifty Shades trilogy, erotic romance became more main stream.  However, it is often confused with erotica.   Generally speaking, erotic romance ends with “happily ever after” and erotica does not.  Erotic romance has more of a story line, exploring love and emotions and centering on two main characters.  It’s all about the romance with the sexual journey second.  It differs from mainstream romance because it is more sexually graphic.  Erotica is all about sex and little else.  It can entail some romance, but the focus is the sex.

The Cheshire Library has been seeing more and more requests for books like Fifty Shades, or erotic romance.  In an effort to fulfill our patrons’ requests, we have placed orders for similar books.  The second most popular author of this genre is Sylvia Day.  She self-published Bared To You and when Berkley Books heard how popular it was, they immediately published it in paper.  It was followed by Reflected In You and the third book in the trilogy, Entwined With You, will be released in June.

Megan Hart is another author that is very popular.  We own several of her titles.

  1. Tempted 
  2. Switch
  3. Deeper
  4. The Space Between Us

There are three other trilogies that are “like Fifty Shades” and they have received excellent reviews.  They are:

The Submissive Trilogy by Tara Sue Me

  1. The Submissive
  2. The Dominant (due out in August)
  3. The Training (due out in October

The Stark Trilogy by Julie Kenner

  1. Release Me
  2. Claim Me
  3. Complete Me (due out in July)

Breathless Trilogy by Maya Banks

  1. Rush
  2. Fever
  3. Burn (due out in August)

You may place holds on these items.  Let us know how you like them and if you’re interested in the library acquiring other titles.