There are many reasons why The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular shows on TV right now: the friendships, wonderfully geeky references, and of course, Sheldon’s antics, all combine to create something we’ve never seen on TV before. A show about geeks that celebrates them instead of mocking them; a show that makes these nerdy guys the heroes that you root for while you’re watching; a show that makes being smart cool and funny, instead of something to be avoided. As author George Beahm says in the introduction of our new companion book, Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory:

The Big Bang Theory didn’t simply serve warmed-up leftovers, but instead gave viewers new, tasty fare. Although we have geeks and girls aplenty, the critical difference is that The Big Bang Theory is a celebration, not a denigration, of cerebration. The good-natured humor can be found in the show’s situations, not in lampooning the characters themselves.

The Big Bang Theory is more than just a show about the clash of the nerds and the hot girl, and Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory is more than your average companion book. It digs down to uncover all of the small things that come together to make the show so great, from an analysis of the show’s original unaired pilot, to a photo-illustrated breakdown of the Sheldonian universe, to an episode guide that shares the meaning behind each title.

To launch this book with a bang (I couldn’t resist!) we’re running a special giveaway that will have a total of 15 winners.

1 Grand Prize winner will get to eat, drink, and shop like the boys—on us—with:

• a $20 Cheesecake Factory gift card (Sheldon recommends the burger!)
• a $15 Midtown Comics gift card (you can time your online shopping to coincide with comic book store night)
• a NASA shot glass (perfect for tequila shots?)
• the T-shirt you see pictured on the cover of the book
• and, of course, a signed copy of Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory

4 runners-up will receive a signed copy of the book along with the cover T-shirt and a NASA shot glass.

10 other winners will get a signed copy of the book.

To enter to win, just tell us who your favorite Big Bang Theory character is in the comments below (no favorite is also acceptable!) by midnight on Wednesday, February 15 (CST).

And in the meantime you can read an excerpt from the book introduction here, and if you sign up to get updates on Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory in the form below, we’ll send you a free PDF excerpt from the book.

Good luck, and may the force be with you!

We are not in support of piracy, obviously. Our continued existence and ability to create books depends on people buying those books, and as e-books are adopted more widely, e-book piracy is bound to continue to grow. But I’m personally not convinced—as many, many people around the web and in academia and in politics are not convinced—that SOPA and PIPA are the way to do that.

We publish books. We’re in the business of making agreements with writers on their copyrighted work, where we pay them a certain amount of money for the privilege of making their work available to book buyers. And so we have an interest in defending those copyrights. I’ve contacted websites on authors’ behalves and asked them to take down copyrighted content. I’ve even put in requests on a few file-sharing sites to take down pirated copies of some of our books (we don’t actively go in search of these, but when Google Alerts drop them in our laps . . .). And it’s a pain. There’s no guarantee they’ll do it, and usually, it’s not worth the time it takes to investigate whether there’s actually infringement going on and put in the request. Sure, it would be faster and easier to be able to report those sites to a US Department of Justice with the ability to immediately shut those sites down.

But it’s faster and easier to do a lot of things (rob a bank rather than go to work every day; eat ice cream for dinner). That doesn’t mean it’s right, or a good idea. That doesn’t mean the benefits outweigh the cost.

Smart Pop sits at an interesting intersection: we produce copyrighted works, that warrant protection . . . and we produce these works about other copyrighted works. What we produce are critical essays, and that’s protected under fair use. There’s fuzzy line when it comes to the details of fair use, and we make a point of always staying on the right side of the line. But if someone disagrees, they have to explain where they think we went wrong. They can’t just shut down bookstores that sell our books. They can’t close down our printers. They can’t prevent readers from buying them.

Which, though it isn’t SOPA’s stated intention, is what a lot of people are afraid it will be used to do: shut down access to content (whether via shutting down sites, or preventing other sites from linking to them for fear of being shut down) that copyright holders don’t like.

And that worries me not because I’m especially worried for our website; it worries me on my own behalf, and on the behalf of the people who read our books. It worries me on behalf of the fansites that have always been so generous in helping us get the word out about our titles. And it worries me on behalf of fandom as a whole, as an concept.

We believe that passionate involvement—through critical essays like ours, or through thoughtful recaps, spirited comment discussion, fan art, etc.—is a valuable way of not just interacting with copyrighted work, but also promoting it and furthering its reach.

And because what is “transformative” and thus protected under fair use, and what is not, is not hard and fast—because there is so much gray area there—I particularly worry, under SOPA, about what could become of the culture of producing and sharing, the community, around copyrighted works that the internet has fostered.

To learn more, or join those sending letters to their representatives: americancensorship.org. (Also, Fark.com also has some great informational links at the bottom of their “whiteout” page.)

Today, I’m very pleased to share Beyond the Wall‘s front cover, which you’ll see over there to the right of this paragraph. The design is the always-excellent work of Charles Brock over at Faceout Studio, who not only put together a whole set of fantastic comps for us, but also patiently weathered (and, okay, largely performed) our extensive search for just the right (dire)wolf—because properly representing the Starks is a pretty tall order.

(Also, there is not exactly a wealth of great threatening wolf shots available for use out there. Shocking, I know. Who wouldn’t want to get in an angry wolf’s face, holding a camera?)

We’ll announce the full line-up as soon as it solidifies, but I can say I’m really excited about the list of people editor Jim Lowder has pulled together here—including Elio and Linda from the fantastic Westeros.org, Adam Whitehead over at The Wertzone, SFF scholars, writers, and more.

Though we love the HBO television series (and there might be a stray television reference here or there), we’re really focusing here on Martin’s novels, from A Game of Thrones all the way through A Dance with Dragons. We wanted to give you advance warning in case you hadn’t finished reading yet. :)

If you want to make sure you’re kept up to date on the book’s progress, you can, of course, sign up for our update list below. We’ll let you know when the contributor list is up, and send you a special early excerpt as soon as it’s available, as well as reminding you when the pub date comes and alerting you to any giveaways we do.

Hope you love the cover as much as we do!

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Through midnight (EST) on February 8 you can enter to win one of three signed copies of Perfectly Plum. Just leave a comment below to be entered (U.S. and Canadian-only entrants, please).

And if you don’t feel like waiting until February to get your hands on a copy of Perfectly Plum, then there’s no better time than the present to purchase a copy for Kindle: it’s currently only 89 cents! You can grab it on Amazon here.

Finally, for the next four weeks we’ll be posting a free essay from Perfectly Plum on the website every Thursday. The first essay: “Ranger As…Hairy Godmother?” by Karen Kendall.

Happy reading, and good luck!

Grand Prize Winner

BRONSON

Runner Up Winners

JOHN V. DEVITO

LESLIE

Book Winners

LYOLA SHYBANOVA

LISA

LINDSEY

CHRIS PETERSON

BRANDI

HILLARY WEBB

BRIAN

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For everyone who didn’t win, we can at the very least offer a free PDF excerpt download when you sign up for The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo mailing list below. We’ll also send you occasional updates about other news (including giveaways!) related to the book.

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Or, if you’d rather just grab your own copy of the book, you can buy The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the following links:

Paperback

Buy From Us
Amazon 
Barnes & Noble 
Indie Bound

E-book

Buy From Us
Kindle 

(It’s also available on iBooks!)

Well, book publishers love new editions. (It gives bookstores a reason to take a fresh look at an old book.) And who am I to resist an excuse to jump back into the Hunger Games series and have a few new writers write a few more great essays?

For our new edition, we drafted Brent Hartinger, Jackson Pearce, and Diana Peterfreund to write essays for us: on mixed opinions of Mockingjay; why we shouldn’t forget about Gale, just because he wasn’t the one Katniss picked; and the game theory of the Games, respectively.  I think they all make incredible additions to the original edition’s fantastic line-up (which you can refresh yourself on, if desired, here).

Here’s what I don’t like about new editions: Sometimes it feels like they’re designed to punish readers who bought the first edition. You buy the first book, and then the publisher comes along and puts out a new one, with just enough extras to make you kind of irritated you didn’t wait. Because if you want to read the new parts, too, you have to buy the whole book all over again.

So we’re bucking the usual trend. In addition to releasing The Girl Who Was on Fire – Movie Edition in print and e-book form, we’re also releasing something specifically for those of you who bought the first edition: the Girl Who Was on Fire – Movie Edition Booster Pack.

It’s only in e-book form, it’s priced at only $5.99, and it includes everything the Movie Edition does that the original edition did not.

(Unfortunately, since it’s an e-book, I can’t link you to it yet; it may not be up and available online until January 17 when the book officially goes on sale. But if you’re signed up to receive updates on our book page or below (either for the original edition or the new one; it’s the same list), we’ll let you know as soon as it does!

There’s one more question to ask here, and that’s: Why are we calling it a Movie Edition?

Is it just some cheap ploy to get the book on those movie display tables at the front of the bookstore? Okay, maybe a little. But mostly, we’re calling it a Movie Edition because of the other thing that’s new about this new edition—or at least will be new, as soon as The Hunger Games hits the big screen.

Both e-book editions—the full book and the Booster Pack—also come with access to a special section with our authors’ thoughts on the Hunger Games movie, to be released end of March right after the film itself. It doesn’t matter whether you buy the Movie Edition in January or in April; you’ll still get access to that content. (The details on how, of course, are in the e-book itself.)

This whole thing is a little bit of an experiment; we’ll be putting everyone’s opinions together, copyediting and proofing, and getting the new pages into various e-pub formats and into you all’s hands in—if all goes as planned!—less than a week. But it’s an experiment we’re really excited about.

We have a lot more planned around the Movie Edition’s release next month and then the film release in March, so we hope you’ll stay tuned for that. And thanks again to those of you who bought and loved and told your friends about the first edition of The Girl Who Was on Fire—because you’re the ones that made this new edition, and the extra content, a possibility!

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There’s only one more week until Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara hit the big screens in David Fincher’s new film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I don’t know about you readers, but we can hardly wait to see it. What with H&M’s new movie-inspired clothing line launch, and all of the coverage leading up to the movie, we can’t stop talking about Lisbeth at Smart Pop, and we figure she’s probably on your radars too. In anticipation of the movie launch, and in celebration of our recent release, The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we’re holding a Dragon Tattoo giveaway.

One grand prize winner will get . . .

• A $100 H&M gift card to buy a wardrobe Lisbeth would approve of
• A $25 Fandango gift card, to see the new movie on us
• A copy of The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Two runner ups will each win . . .

• A $25 Fandango giftcard
• A copy of The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Seven other entrants will win . . .

• A copy of The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

To enter to win all you have to do is tell us in the comments what your favorite Millennium Trilogy book (or movie) is—and “I don’t have a favorite” counts as a legitimate entry! Just be sure to leave your comment by midnight on December 28, CST (U.S. and Canadian entries only). Good luck all, and we’ll see you at the movies on the twenty-first!

(And if you’re interested in learning more about the book, you can get a free excerpt below, or visit our book page.)
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For more news and information on The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and to get a free PDF excerpt, sign up for our mailing list in the form below!

Starting immediately through midnight on March 6, 2012 (CST), you can enter our “Dine Like a Mad Man” sweepstakes for a real chance to dine like Draper and drink like Sterling (which will include ordering an old fashioned or martini, natch). Six lucky entrants will each win one of the following prizes—altogether worth over $1200:

Grand Prize

Dinner for four at Barbetta (valued at $500)

First Prizes

Gift certificate from the Russian Tea Room
Evening at the Two E Bar/Lounge at the Taj Pierre Hotel
Lunch at the Algonquin Hotel Roundtable
Dinner for two at Keens Steakhouse

Runner Up

An Utz Party Pack

All winners will also receive a copy of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook, and you can read more about the individual restaurants in this blog post. And most importantly, click the red button below to enter! (We’re only accepting entries from the U.S. and Canada; apologies to our international readers.) Good luck!

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For more information on The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@DineLikeDraper) and Facebook, and sign up for book updates in the form below (if you sign up for updates, you’ll also get a free PDF excerpt from the book!).

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On December 21, 2012, the American film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo premieres. I confess: I haven’t seen the Swedish version. I hear it’s pretty incredible. But at least judging by the trailer, this new version looks pretty incredible too:

In the months since the film was first announced, most of the discussion has—as it did for the book—surrounded the Millennium trilogy’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander . . . the subject of the latest addition to our Psychology of series, The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a collection of psychologists all writing about Lisbeth herself).

Some people call her an original; others call her cliché. As Luisita Torres noted last year on Politics Daily: “She’s hot. She’s cool. She’s violent and gentle . . . sexual and frigid.” She’s a victim. She’s a superhero. She’s—as editors Robin Rosenberg, PhD, and Shannon O’Neill note—“one of the most enigmatic and intriguing characters you’ll ever come across—an astoundingly intelligent, prickly bundle of contradictions.” Lisbeth Salander is, as one of the book’s contributors very astutely noted, a Goth-punk Rorschach test: our responses to her, the way we see her and the way we interpret her actions, says as much about us as it does about her.

The duality of Lisbeth—in her character, and in our reactions to her—is one of the ongoing themes of The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. From an analysis of perceptions of the Goth community (both from outside and from within) to a look at what Lisbeth has in common with other polarizing women in our world, the contributors return frequently to Lisbeth’s apparent contradictions, and which of them can be resolved in a way that helps us better understand her and the series as a whole.

But that’s far from the only question Lisbeth raises, or the only question about her The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo engages with. From the book’s introduction:

Reading a good book is like undertaking an investigation: as readers we comb through paragraphs and pages . . . to build a coherent, compelling picture of a complete world. When we come to the end of a book and snap shut the cover, we often feel satisfied that our investigation is over. Our questions have been answered; the “case” is closed. But the books that truly affect us—whether thrillers, mysteries, or stories of unrequited love—often don’t give us a complete sense of closure. They raise questions that linger long after the last page . . . But for many of us, the central case to be cracked in the trilogy is that of Lisbeth Salander: who she truly is, what she really wants, and what she has to tell us about our world and ourselves.

(If you want to read the rest: signing up for book updates, below or on our book page, will also net you a PDF of the full introduction, plus Marisa Mauro’s version of the analysis the court psychologist in the series’ third book should have done, delivered right to your inbox.)

The book is broken into three parts: “The Girl with the Armored Façade” (discussing her tough exterior, both literally and figuratively); “The Girl with the Tornado Inside” (delving deeper into her history, and the trauma she’s suffered); and “The Girl Who Couldn’t Be Stopped” (the ways in which Lisbeth has taken that trauma and transformed it into power). You can see the full table of contents over on the book page, plus, soon, read the first 250 words of each essay.

In the end, I think you’ll come away, as I did, with a much richer portrait of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as well as her relationships with Blomkvist, her family, and the rest of her world.

Bonus link! A peek at the Lisbeth Salander-inspired H&M clothing line from the New York Post.

In case you’re in the same boat: here’s our top 5 best gift bets from our last 12 months of new releases. We’ve also added a few related non-book gift options to round out each suggestion—just in case you really like the person (or your Secret Santa lower limit is higher than a list price of $16.95).

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For the Mad Men fan, the foodie, or the history buff:

The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook

You’re especially in luck if your giftee is all three. Every recipe is put into its Mad Men context (you can look each dish or drink up by season and episode, and the authors provide a quick sense of the scene in which it appeared) and accompanied by plenty of historical detail and nifty food history facts. Not to mention, every recipe we’ve tried has been pretty darn tasty, too.

Add-on gifts:

• Classic Libbey martini glasses (larger than the ’60s model, but hey, the world’s a harsher place)
• A skillet and a roll of aluminum foil (perfect for making the book’s Pineapple Upside-Down Cake)
• Sterling Cooper bumper sticker (a subtle way to demonstrate devotion)
• Canadian Club Whisky (Don’s favorite!)

For the Hunger Games fan who can’t wait for the movie:

The Girl Who Was on Fire

This collection of YA writers like Carrie Ryan, Ned Vizzini, Sarah Rees Brennan, and more, all talking about various aspects of the Hunger Games (from reality tv to the love triangle, from self-sacrifice and community to fashion and PTSD), is a great extra for both casual and hardcore Hunger Games fans—as well as readers on both the “young” and “adult” ends of the genre’s spectrum.

Add-on gifts:

• Team Katniss t-shirt (contributor Jennifer Lynn Barnes would approve!)
• Real/Not Real charm (which we think would look pretty great on its own on a black cord or silver chain)
• The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook (we haven’t read it ourselves, but we’ve heard good things)

For the amateur (or professional!) psychologist, or anyone intrigued by Lisbeth Salander:

The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By the time Christmas comes, the US version of the film with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara will be in theaters—which means people will be talking yet again about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Here, psychologists and psychiatrists take on the mystery of Lisbeth Salander, using the clues provided in the series to get inside Lisbeth’s head, and come out with some intriguing insights about the way she interacts with the world around her and what our reactions to her say about us.

Add-on gifts:

• A gift card for H&M’s new Lisbeth-inspired clothing line
• Custom wasp temporary tattoo (because I think we can all agree Lisbeth’s neck tattoo beats the series’ eponymous dragon; art or art or art and custom tattoo site)
• IKEA gift card (to recreate Lisbeth’s furniture purchases; scroll to the bottom)

For the science lover, the “geek,” or the geek-adjacent:

Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory

Our favorite aspects of this non-traditional tv show companion? The photo-illustrated tour of the Sheldonian universe, “from couch to cosmos”; a guide to the meaning of every episode title; a survey of the show’s real-life scientist guest stars; and the “elemental explication” sidebars that pepper the interior. But there’s plenty more, here, too, for both the Pennys and Sheldons among us.

Add-on gifts:

• A gift card to The Cheesecake Factory (Sheldon would recommend the burger!)
• Any of the shirts researched by the fabulous folks at SheldonShirts.com
• More: EW’s pretty great TBBT gift guide

For the science fiction buff, or the Joshua Jackson fan:

Fringe Science

Okay, maybe not so much the Joshua Jackson fan, if he’s the only reason they tune in every Friday night. Otherwise, Fringe Science’s survey of the science and SF in the show (always with an eye toward the show’s larger themes) will help your loved one weather the current winter hiatus and re-energize them for new episodes in January.

Add-on gifts:

• Cow stress toy (name it Gene!)
• Reiden Lake t-shirt (“Reiden Lake: soft spot to another universe”)
• Cortexiphan trial subject mug

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Happy gifting, and happy holidays!