Posts tagged with jane-austen
I should probably contribute to this.
Whoa: the Kickstarter fund for Ever, Jane (a multiplayer role-playing game inspired by Jane Austen's books) is plugging right along, hovering at more than $30,000 of their $100,000 goal, with 25 days yet to go. Interested parties should visit the game's Kickstarter site, which, according to lead designer Judy Tyrer, offers a downloadable prototype...
My eyes, they roll
I have serious doubts about this, you guys: BBC News recently posted a round-up article about the upcoming series of six contemporary re-workings of Jane Austen's books. The HarperCollins project kicks off this month with Joanna Trollope's version of Sense and Sensibility, due out on October 29th. Future authors include...
Pride and Prejudice reworked (some more)
There was some good news on the Jane Austen continuation/retelling front this week: AustenBlog posted a very positive review of Nancy Kelley's His Good Opinion, and I was pleased to see that Lara S. Ormiston's upcoming Pride and Prejudice retelling Unequal Affection has been blessed with lovely cover art...
Literary shade-throwing
Flavorwire has assembled a list of Jane Austen's "Most Famous Trolls, Critics, and Doubters", including but not limited to Charlotte Brontë, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf. Without exception, all of the names mentioned remind me of one of my favorite quotes from Cold Comfort Farm...
Not sure if it's going to be a period piece, though.
In much-less-distressing movie news, a few weeks ago IndieWire announced that director Whit Stillman has begun casting for his next movie, an adaptation of Jane Austen's little-known novella Lady Susan. I'm not a big fan of most of Austen's juvenilia, but...
Have they nothing else to do with their time?
Wooow. I was ridiculously excited by the recent news that England's ten-pound banknote is going to feature Jane Austen's face*, but apparently some people were less delighted: according to Jezebel, Caroline Criado-Perez, the woman who lead the campaign to feature Austen's image, has received a "deluge" of rape and death threats from Twitter users...
I would visit this place, but not in costume.
We still have a lot of Jane Austen-related news to get through this week, but nothing as amazing as yesterday's item. Today we're posting a link to the newly-released trailer for the upcoming film Austenland. It looks super embarrassing (Austen fans = Beliebers?), but...
Still not April Fool's Day
Good LORD. There's a 12-foot tall statue of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy floating in a lake in London. I can't decide if I'm terrified (this is not a particularly realistic representation, guys) or if I think that miniature versions should be sold as home decor options for personal swimming pools...
Jane Austen's nastiest one-liners
Adelle Waldman on Slate ranked Jane Austen's books from best to worst, and listed the ten "most devastating one-liners" featured in her novels. Unsurprisingly, I totally disagreed with her best-to-worst order (Emma at number one, and Persuasion dead last? Please...
Austen-inspired arts and crafts
The design-and-print-your-own-fabric website Spoonflower is asking readers to submit and vote on fabric patterns "inspired by the idea of what life would be like in a Jane Austen novel". Some of them are pretty creepy-looking (and several have nothing to do with Austen), but I liked at least ten of them enough to vote for them...
Filling a void
Thank goodness: someone has finally responded to the worldwide demand* for a book combining wacky cat photos with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice...
Waste of time
Ugh. NYMag recently posted a ridiculous article about Jane Austen's novels, asserting (shocker!) that she's, like, still way popular, particularly with the ladies! Thanks for the info, guys! The whole thing is really poorly researched (it describes The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as "a web series in which Mr. Darcy has Twitter", which, while technically true...
My Christmas list is complete!
Man, this has been a great year for Pride and Prejudice cover art. (You wouldn't think you could measure years that way, but you totally can.) I'm currently staring in awe at this edition...
Jane Austen and Lifetime
I am straight-up appalled by this idea: Jennifer Love Hewitt is teaming up with Lifetime to develop Darcy's Town, a "modern retelling of Jane Austen's literary classic Pride and Prejudice set in a small Virginia town". I was much less horrified by the article's mention of another Austen-inspired TV project...
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: not quite perfect, but awfully fun
I've finally gotten fully caught up on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (a professionally acted, modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice told via twice-weekly YouTube videos), and while I'm finding them at least 90% adorable, I think the writers are making a couple of mistakes. Mostly, they need to make Lydia less charming, because right now she's kind of making Lizzie seem like a judgmental bitch...
An Austen FarmVille
Are all Legacy Interactive games this irritating? I've been trying to find out more information about the upcoming Facebook game Rogues & Romance (appalling name, I know, but it's based on Jane Austen's novels), but their website sucks....
Sanditon (Continued), by Jane Austen and others
Most of our posts this week are going to be devoted to reviews, as our To Be Read shelf is once again looking like a potential earthquake hazard. And while the rest of the reviews are going to be of novels we've received specifically for Wordcandy, today I'm focusing on two books I picked up at my local library: Charlotte, by Jane Austen and Julia Barrett, and Sanditon, by Jane Austen and “Another Lady”.
Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, edited by Robert Morrison
Before I get started, let me clarify something: this isn't a review of Jane Austen's Persuasion. It's more an extended hissyfit about the annotations featured in this particular edition of Persuasion, and therefore I'm going to assume it's only going to interest my fellow hardcore Austen nerds. (Sorry, non-hardcore-Austen-nerds. Try again tomorrow.) Anyway: VAGUE SPOILERS AHOY.
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...
She must be joking.
You guys reckon this will go way, way on sale after Christmas? Because I would only pay $325 for a clutch (even a super-cool one, like this) if it came stuffed with at least $250 in cash.Note: Ac...
At least it's not a monster mash-up
According to the Times, HarperCollins has commissioned Joanna Trollope to write a contemporary reworking of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Trollope's book will be the first in what is descr...
National treasure
AWESOME: I skipped over to AustenBlog to see what happened with the partial manuscript of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons that was auctioned off earlier this month. I was delighted to ...
Been there
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Keri Russell has signed on to star in the upcoming film adaptation of Shannon Hale's novel Austenland. The movie will be directed by Jerusha Hess (best known ...
Leading lady material
Well, this makes me slightly more inclined to see it: Emma Stone has apparently been offered the lead role in the upcoming film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (Admittedly, this on...
Generous millionaires take note:
My birthday is in January.A handwritten and incredibly rare manuscript of Jane Austen's unfinished novel The Watsons is going up for auction this summer. The manuscript (the only one still in pri...
Pride and Prejudice: A Musical
I'm told that the first production of the Pride and Prejudice musical in Washington State is currently running at a high school about an hour away from my house. I'm not sure I'll have a chance t...
Deplorable
AustenBlog informs me there's another Sense and Sensibility update in the works, this one apparently destined for TV Movie-of-the-Week status. The whole production looks pretty bad, but I was par...
The real undead
And speaking of Jane Austen, did they really need to write a sequel (as well as a prequel, and a comic book book adaptation, and an upcoming movie version) to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Lik...