Hollywood S Stephen King

Tony Magistrale explores many of the movie versions of Stephen King's works and provides important insights into both the films and the fiction on which they are based.

Discusses each of the films and TV movies made from King's novels and short stories, and shares his comments on them

In 1985, six men and one woman are called back together to search for a creature of unspeakable evil that had stalked them as children.

Includes the stories “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”—set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine A “hypnotic” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas—including the inspirations behind the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption—from Stephen King, bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters. This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In “The Body,” four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.” “The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is,” hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons.

"Smithy is an American original, worthy of a place on the shelf just below your Hucks, your Holdens, your Yossarians." —Stephen King Every so often, a novel comes along that captures the public’s imagination with a story that sweeps readers up and takes them on a thrilling, unforgettable ride. Ron McLarty’s The Memory of Running is this decade’s novel. By all accounts, especially his own, Smithson "Smithy" Ide is a loser. An overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk, Smithy’s life becomes completely unhinged when he loses his parents and long-lost sister within the span of one week. Rolling down the driveway of his parents’ house in Rhode Island on his old Raleigh bicycle to escape his grief, the emotionally bereft Smithy embarks on an epic, hilarious, luminous, and extraordinary journey of discovery and redemption.

Stephen King revisits five of his favorite short stories that have been turned into films:The Shawshank Redemption(based on the novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption") was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and best actor for Morgan Freeman.1408starred John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson and was a huge box office success in 2007. The short story "Children of the Corn" was adapted into the popularChildren of the Corn.The Manglerwas inspired by King's loathing for laundry machines from his own experience working in a laundromat.Hearts in Atlantis(based on "Low Men in Yellow Coats," the first part of the novelHearts in Atlantis) starred Anthony Hopkins.This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia.

In four previously unpublished short works, a man explores his dark nature, a writer confronts a stranger, a cancer patient makes a deal with the devil, and a woman makes a horrifying discovery about her husband.

A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, while experiencing dreams of a battle between good and evil, move toward an actual confrontation as they migrate to Boulder, Colorado.