Posts tagged with classic-books
Anna Karenina meets Mad Men
I'm having difficulty picturing this, but InStyle informs me that Banana Republic is planning a capsule collection inspired by the upcoming film adaptation of Anna Karenina, but "with more of a 50s feel"...
No thank you.
Ugh. I'm not a fan of Anna Karenina, or Joe Wright, or Tom Stoppard, or Merchant-Ivory-lite literary adaptations in general. But this lavish new trailer certainly looks pretty, and I suspect the movie will win many awards (but not my hard-earned $10)...
Swashbuckling, etc.
Guy Ritchie has been hired to direct a new film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. No word on whether or not it will be as smirkingly tongue-in-cheek as Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies, but since they're describing it as a "stylized" version of the novel, I'm assuming so...
Seriously abridged
If you're a fan of the Classics Illustrated series or the children's comics anthology Little Lit, you might want to check out the recently-released collection The Graphic Canon, Vol. 1. The trilogy will feature nearly 200 gorgeously-illustrated literary adaptions, ranging from the early epics...
Worlds collide
According to io9, BOOM! Studios has asked Mouse Guard creator David Petersen to create cover art for several Muppets-meet-classic-kid-stories mashup comics...
Meaningless awards
The American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published by the Illinois State University, recently compiled a list of the 100 best first lines from novels. As always, this is is totally subjective...
New-old stories
According to the Guardian, 500 "new" fairytales were recently discovered in an archive in Regensburg, Germany, where they had been stored for over 150 years. The stories are part of the collection of folklore gathered during the mid-19th century by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz...
A legacy to be proud of
We were sorry to hear that Jan Berenstain, who co-wrote and illustrated the perennially popular Berenstain Bears series with her husband Stan, suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness. Ms. Berenstain was 88, and is survived by two sons and four grandchildren.
Utterly bizarre
Scholastic Parent & Child magazine has trotted out their list of the 100 Greatest Books for Kids, awarding the top spot to Charlotte's Web, second place to Goodnight Moon, and third place to A Wrinkle in Time.
Real estate pin-ups
Last week, Flavorwire put together a slideshow of 15 Famous Authors' Beautiful Estates. It was fun to flip through, although surprisingly few of the homes had my heart burning with real estate envy...
Hipster Hamlet
If you told me this entire line of books (from Penguin's Puffin Books imprint) was a tie-in for a new series of classic literature adaptations airing on ABC Family, I would totally believe you:(It...
A nod to the pulp factor
Publishers Weekly did a great post recently about the many and varied cover art choices for John Steinbeck's East of Eden. I can't say I agree with their statement "If you haven’t yet read East o...
At long last, more Cold Comfort
For the first time since its original publication fifty years ago, a reprint of Stella Gibbons's short story collection Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is going hit bookshelves next week. Cold Com...
A modern classic
Much to my delight, the second book for NPR's Back-Seat Book Club is Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my all-time favorite books. The Back-Seat Book Club is technically aimed at read...
Abridged beyond belief
These "Baby Lit" books are cute, right? And the Jane Austen one at least got a good review on AustenBlog. But how could anyone make Romeo and Juliet into a baby board book (even if it's just a "...
That's some very, very tiny font.
I'm totally delighted by the images from PosterText, a company that designs posters featuring the contents of various classic novels*, artistically arranged to depict an important scene or element...
The Thin Man redux
According to THR, writer-director Billy Ray has been hired to write a new adaptation of the classic Dashiell Hammett novel The Thin Man. Johnny Depp (seriously, does that man ever take time off?)...
The James Fenimore Cooper rest stop
Publishers Weekly has started what appears to be a mini-series of posts devoted to weird stuff named after authors. Some of them make sense (an extinct species of large-toothed whale named after ...
Peter Rabbit continues
According to Publishers Weekly, Frederick Warne has announced that it will publish The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, written by actress Emma Thompson, in September 2012. The book is the 24th tale ...
A modern (but still undoubtedly depressing) Tess
THR is reporting that Sundance Selects has acquired the North American rights to Trishna, a new movie set in contemporary Rajasthan based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles....
But can I really buy an twisted antihero named Pinkie?
Speaking of violent, gloomy movies, if you can't wait until March, last year's film adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock is finally popping up in various arthouse theaters:
I was under...
I think I'll skip this one.
According to Vulture, Jesse Eisenberg is set to star in director Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double, which they describe as "Fight Club for bureaucrats". That a...
WAG literary taste
Aw: Sales of Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird rose by 123% in the UK after David and Victoria Beckham named their new baby "Harper" in honor of the book, said to be Victoria's favorit...
I do like the flying lobster spaceship, though.
Trailer's up for Disney's John Carver. Behold:Okay, that looks totally cheesy, but this is based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) book. Cheesy is to be expected.
And then the drink takes a drink...
Sadly, this "How To Drink Like Your Favorite Authors" article does not include a "Which author/lush are you?" quiz or drink recipes, but it's a fun read nonetheless.
Are we thinking of the same book?
I made it most of the way through this Times article about plans to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Gone With the Wind, but I had to stop when one of the devoted fans described the novel's setti...
Clearly, graduation season is coming
They're not out in the U.S. until the beginning of May, but the Moleskine "Le Petit Prince" notebooks are adorable. The books will come in two different sizes and layouts, both of which will disp...
Not gone after all
The Times has posted an article about the final typescript of the last four chapters of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The chapters—which were mistakenly believed to have been burned in ...
Yes, I'm sure the 3-D special effects will make it extra special.
Wow, Matthew Macfadyen has really been working on developing that purring baritone:The voice is good. The look... not so much. At thirty-six, he's a little young to be letting himself go to this...
A stroke of genius
PopEater is reporting that Bradley Cooper hopes to play Tom Buchanan in the upcoming Baz Luhrmann adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Sadly, the article makes it clear that Luhrmann has never express...