TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Mary Karr talks about memoirs, alcohol abuse and her new 'Lit' Mary Karr's best-selling 1995 memoir, The Liars' Club, about her rough Texas childhood with alcoholic parents, "kick-started ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Ten of the best: teachers AbelardAbelard was a brilliant early-medieval theologian and rhetorician who agreed to take on Héloïse as a pupil. The two began an affair, and when it was discovered, she was sent to a nunnery and he was castrated. The story has often been retold, notably by Alexander Pope. "From lips like those what precept failed to move? Too soon they taught me 'twas no sin to love."HolofernesThe schoolmaster in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost is a loquacious pedant whose version of English boasts itself "full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion". No pupil can have understood him.ThwackumThe eponymous hero of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is adopted by Squire Allworthy, who is obtuse enough to hire a man called "Thwackum" to educate him. Thwackum is a clergyman who "maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity" and "whose meditations were full of birch".Mr SqueersIn Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens put a psychopath in charge of the classroom. Up in dark, cold Yorkshire, one-eyed sadist Wackford Squeers presides over Dotheboys Hall, where parents dispose of children, and where Nicholas gets a job. Squeers thrashes them and Mrs Squeers feeds them brimstone and treacle.Lucy SnoweThe heroine of Charlotte Brontë's last novel, Villette, finds employment teaching in a private girls' boarding school in Belgium. Plain and brainy, she's scornful of the silly, rich girls she has to teach. The school hums with sexual tension, and Lucy falls for first the school doctor, then a teacher.Anne ShirleyShe was once "Anne of Green Gables", but in LM Montgomery's sequel, she has become "Anne of Avonlea", a teenage teacher at Avonlea School. The awkward orphan has become attractive and accomplished, and teaching is the appropriate occupation for such a high-aspiring girl. Naturally, her former foe, Gilbert Blythe, also becomes a teacher.Paul PennyfeatherSent down from Oxford after being debagged by hoorays in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, what can Paul do? Become a prep-school teacher, of course. He finds himself at a school in Wales staffed by misfits, criminals and drunkards. At sports day, the wig-wearing Mr Prendergast shoots a pupil, Lord Tangent, with the starting pistol.QuelchGreyfriars schoolboy Billy Bunter may be cowardly, selfish, lazy, dishonest, and irredeemably greedy, but he wins your allegiance by having (and often failing) to dodge the cane of Mr Quelch. While keen on corporal punishment, however, Quelch is himself not unsympathetic, being merely a scholarly man frustrated by his pupils' ignorance.Miss Jean BrodieBased on one of Muriel Spark's own teachers, Jean Brodie is dangerously charismatic. She talks of being in her "prime", and captures the spirits of a few chosen girls at a posh Edinburgh girls' school. She tells them about art and Italy, but her lessons often allow her to express her admiration for Mussolini's fascists.HectorThe eccentric English teacher in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys wins the allegiance of his pupils at a Sheffield grammar school with his disregard for "best practice". He conveys his love of Housman and Hardy, but also likes the contact of a young chap riding pillion on his motorbike. JMJohn Mullanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith It's been the year's strangest trend – horror 'mash-ups' of classic novels. Stephanie Merritt enters a blood-spattered worldIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a brand as successful and limited as the Jane Austen industry must be in want of diversification. (It is a further truth that anyone writing about Austen must begin with a variant of that sentence.) Even the relentless adaptations machine, which seems to produce remakes of her best-known novels while the previous remake is still in post-production, finds itself necessarily constrained by the fact that Austen wrote only six complete books, of which one – Pride and Prejudice – is by far the best known. While the public appetite for Austen remains unsated, she herself remains stubbornly unable to produce any more in the series. For an enterprising publisher, therefore, there was really only one solution: give Austen's characters a new lease of life by splicing them with another, equally popular genre.Literary-horror "mash-ups" are probably the strangest trend to have landed in our bookshops this year, led by the phenomenon of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk £8.99, pp320). First published in the spring, the book immediately became a New York Times bestseller, with more than 700,000 copies sold worldwide to date, and film rights bought up by Hollywood. It has just been reprinted in an illustrated deluxe gift edition for the Christmas market ("now with 30% more zombies!") and has, naturally, spawned its own legion of imitators keen to jump on the bandwagon.The original idea was the brainchild of Jason Rekulak, an editor at Quirk Books, a tiny independent publishing house based in Philadelphia. Inspired by the "creative copyright violations" abounding in other genres, with people conflating songs, film trailers or television shows on websites such as YouTube, he began compiling a list of classic works of literature in the public domain which might benefit from an influx of pop culture figures such as pirates, ninjas or zombies. "Once I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had a title," he said in a recent interview. He called Seth Grahame-Smith, an LA-based television writer, who takes up the story in his introduction to the new edition. "I told him it was the most brilliant idea I'd ever heard."The premise is simple: early 19th-century England is menaced by a plague of the undead; the five Bennet sisters are accomplished martial arts warriors, having been trained by their father (Mrs Bennet remains reassuringly obsessed with finding them husbands); Fitzwilliam Darcy is a renowned monster-hunter possessed of superior Japanese fighting skills. The surprisingly wide appeal of the book is less easy to understand, although it must be based primarily on the comedy of incongruity, which itself depends on familiarity with the original. Austen's characters – their pursuits, their language, their careful mannerisms – are so instantly recognisable either from the books or their film versions that they lend themselves beautifully to absurd juxtapositions, as in the recent ITV series Lost in Austen, where a modern young woman disillusioned with love collides literally with the world of Elizabeth and Darcy.But Lost in Austen had an obvious target audience – single women in love with the romance of Austen's world – while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems a more unlikely marriage of fan bases. The success of any pastiche lies in its ability to capture the tone of that original, and in this Grahame-Smith has succeeded admirably. By inserting his zombie battles into Austen's text in appropriate style, the structure and the bulk of the book's contents remain hers:"Apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family. Mrs Bennet had seen her elder daughter much admired by the Netherfield party. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most accomplished hapkido master in England; and despite having their gowns soiled with blood and bits of brain, Catherine and Lydia had been fortunate enough never to be without partners, which was all that they had yet learnt to care for at a ball."Whether the monster mash-up will blossom into a fully fledged genre or prove a one-hit wonder remains to be seen. Grahame-Smith, despite having told the BBC earlier this year "I don't want to follow this up with Sense and Sensibility and Vampires, because I could easily box myself in as being the mash-up guy," has since signed a deal with Grand Central books for an alleged $575,000 to write a life of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". Meanwhile Quirk Books are attempting to repeat their success with the recently published Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk £8.99, p344) by Ben H Winters.Here, the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, are exiled to a small island off the Devonshire coast, where polite society does its best to maintain propriety in the face of terrors of the deep. As with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on some level the monsters are not entirely inappropriate: the society Austen depicts is highly predatory on both sides, with young girls ready to be picked off and devoured by unscrupulous men such as George Wickham, and equally rapacious women bent on capturing their often unwitting prey. It might be argued that the mash-ups only make the metaphorical literal.While Marianne grows feverish over the dashing Willoughby, who saves her from a giant octopus, her less attractive but ultimately more durable suitor, Colonel Brandon, is presented as a benign man-monster with "a set of long, squishy tentacles protruding from his face, writhing this way and that, like hideous living facial hair of slime green… but his countenance was sensible and his address particularly gentleman-like." Naturally, Brandon proves himself a true hero, and Marianne learns to love the beauty of his heart (though in this version she also makes a pleasing discovery that brings her "certain marital satisfactions").In a recent blog for the Huffington Post, Winters laid out some golden rules for collaborating with dead people, beginning with: "Pick a really famous dead person" and "pick a really famous book". With this, you can't help feeling, he has put his finger on the genre's inherent flaw. Pride and Prejudice is so famous that even people who have never picked up a copy know its essentials. Even Austen's less-read novels don't have that kind of reach, and other hopeful authors are expanding the idea to famous figures in history, such as AE Moorat's recent Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter (Hodder £7.99, pp400), a clear attempt to get in ahead of Grahame-Smith's Lincoln. Moorat (a pseudonym for author Andrew Holmes) has draped his very funny tale of the marauding undead over a solid framework of historical detail, beginning as the 18-year-old Victoria takes the throne of a country beset by succubi, demons and reanimated corpses. Fortunately, the feisty young monarch is taught her craft by Maggie Brown, the sturdy Scottish demon hunter. As with the Austen adaptations, it is the women who are bold and quick-witted enough to take on the monsters, a nice reversal of the passive victim role traditionally handed to young women, in horror as in history.But the other obvious problem with monster mash-ups is that the joke very quickly grows old. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is often very funny, but by the third or fourth chapter you've well and truly got the idea; by the time you come to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the novelty has thoroughly faded. Winters himself sums up the future of Austen mash-ups on his blog when he says: "Confidentially, when Austen and I started collaborating, she wanted to do Persuasion and Sea Monsters because it's got loads of boats in it. I had to sort of gingerly explain that people don't read that one so much any more."Jane AustenFictionStephanie Merrittguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Led Zeppelin, Gods of Rock on the Celestial Staircase Mick Wall examines the salacious, diabolical career of Led Zeppelin, and the phenomenal music they made. feeds.nytimes.com |
Film Weekly goes on The Road with Viggo Mortensen This week's edition goes on a journey with The Road star Viggo Mortensen, hangs on for lift-off at the Bafta Orange Rising Star nominations, flies Up in the Air with George Clooney and comes down to Earth with a thump with Crude, a documentary about the true price of oil.Viggo Mortensen stars as The Man, journeying with his son south in search of safety and humanity, in John Hillcoat's film of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. The actor tells Jason Solomons how he prepared for the role (Tarkovsky movies were in the mix) and pays tribute to his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee.Jason was also at the announcement of this year's Bafta Orange Rising Star nominations, which features a very strong lineup: Jesse Eisenberg of Zombieland and Adventureland fame, About a Boy and Skins' Nicholas Hoult, Carey Mulligan who made a brilliant breakthrough in An Education, Tahar Rahim of Un Prophéte, and Kristen Stewart of the Twilight saga. Noel Clarke, who won the award last year, shares what the prize meant for him, and nominee Nicholas Hoult, who sports an American accent, fake tan and a very fluffy jumper in the widely-praised A Single Man, reveals how he landed his role in Tom Ford's directorial debut only two weeks before shooting started.Peter Bradshaw then joins Jason to review some of this week's key releases: Jason Reitman's smart, stylish and enjoyable corporate comedy Up in the Air with George Clooney, Hirokazu Kore-eda's beautiful Japanese family drama Still Walking and the cockney geezer chamber opera 44 Inch Chest, starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Ian McShane.Finally, Jason speaks to documentary-maker Joe Berlinger about his film Crude, which deftly assembles the complex stories surrounding oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon and how the local communities mounted their legal challenge against the mighty American oil giant Chevron.Jason SolomonsPeter BradshawJason Phipps feeds.guardian.co.uk |