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Atlas Obscura has a roundup of tragic love tales from classic literature.
In Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe, two young lovers, forbidden to marry because of family rivalries whisper their forbidden love through cracks in the wall. Their story met its fateful end when the lovers decided to escape their families, and meet under a mulberry tree. Thisbe arrived at the rendezvous first, and narrowly escaped a lion attack, dropping her distinctive veil in the process. When Pyramus arrives and finds the blood soaked veil, he throws himself on his sword; when Thisbe returns to the scene, she does the same.
Does that plot sound familiar? Pyramus and Thisbe are considered to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. There are several more stories in the post, plus links about places connected with the tragic lovers. Link
Tired of the classics? Instantly rejuvenate boring fiction by adding feline. I mean, you've got to hand it to I Can Haz Cheezburger and Comediva - they know that LOL cats are like catnip to the Interwebbers in all of us.
Behold: Kitty Lit 101
Previously on Neatorama: Movies Recast with Cats
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We’ve featured a bunch of pumpkin carvings for Halloween so far, but Flavorwire’s literary collection definitely has some of the most highbrow jack-o-lantern designs we’ve seen so far.
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The following article is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John’ Bathroom Reader.
The original Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t Boris Karloff -it was (believe it or not) a character created by a 19-year-old author named Mary Shelley …more than 190 years ago.
BACKGROUND
In the summer of 1816, 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her 24-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Switzerland “It proved a wet, uncongenial summer,” she wrote some 15 years later, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.”
To pass the time, the Shelleys and their neighbors -28-year-old Lord Byron, his 23-year-old personal physician, and his 18-year-old lover- read German ghost stories aloud. They enjoyed it so much that one day, Byron announced, “We will each write a ghost story.” Everyone agreed, but apparently the poets, unaccustomed to prose writing, couldn’t come up with anything very scary.
Mary was determined to do better. “I busied myself to think of a story,” she recalled, “One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.” Yet she couldn’t come up with anything. Every morning, her companions asked: “Have you thought of a story?” “And each morning,” she wrote later, “I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”
A FLASH OF INSPIRATION
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
One evening, Mary sat by the fireplace, listening to her husband and Byron discuss the possibility of reanimating a corpse with electricity, giving it what they called “vital warmth.”
The discussion finally ended well after midnight, and Shelley retired. But Mary, “transfixed in speculation,” couldn’t sleep.
“When I placed my head on the pillow,” she recalled, “I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arouse in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -with shut eyes but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together …I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half-vital motion.
“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of light which he had communicated would fade; that this thing would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery eyes…”
THE PERFECT HORROR STORY
At this point, Mary opened her eyes in terror -so frightened that she needed reassurance it had all just been her imagination. She gazed around the room, but just couldn’t shake the image of “my hideous phantom.” Finally, to take her mind off the creature, she went back to the ghost story she’d been trying to compose all week. “If only I could contrive one,” she thought, “that would frighten people as I myself had been frightened that night!” Then she realized that her vision was, in fact, the story she’d been reaching for.
As she recounted: “Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began the day with the words, ‘It was on a dreary night in November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”
THE NOVEL
The first version of Frankenstein was a short story. But Mary’s husband encouraged her to develop it further, and she eventually turned it into a novel. It was published anonymously in three parts in 1818. “Mary,” notes one critic, “did not think it important enough to sign her name to the book… And since her husband wrote the book’s preface, people assumed he had written the rest of the book as well… It was not until a later edition of Frankenstein that the book was revealed as the work of a young girl.”
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The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. In honor of the occasion, here is a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Talk about an easy subject to research! It might have been easier to write up a “books that have never been banned anywhere” list. The banning of books seems so ridiculous, simplistic, and stupid to most of us. But man, in all his Jeckyll and Hyde glory, will all-too-often, when trying to solve a problem, come up with a solution much worse. This is “the 29th annual Banned Books Week.” The week is used to condemn censorship and “thought police.”
O.K., let’s take a look at a brief (in the scheme of these things) list of books that have been (ironically) banned here in the U.S….
1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 has to head this list of “ironic books banned.” Why? Fahrenheit 451 is an entire novel about the future and the banning (and burning) of books. It was banned, ironically, because one of the books that eventually gets banned and burned is the Bible. Drawn your own conclusions, my (hopefully) intelligent readers.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Mark Twain was a racist? A product of the times? Twain uses the bombshell “N” word so as to illustrate the awfulness of the word (and all its connotations). This vicious word is still, far and away, the most highly-charged and controversial word in the English language. So, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban the book. Or better still, as in more recent examples, issue the book with the “N” word cleverly edited out.
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
There isn’t enough time to edit out all the examples of the expression “f*** you” being used in this one. Also banned because it promotes youthful rebellion and disrespect of authority. Catcher in the Rye was the book that guy was reading when he shot and killed John Lennon. So maybe if it were still banned… hmmm, slippery slope, isn’t it?
4. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Handford
Misprint, right? Uh, no. The very first Where’s Waldo? book was, indeed, banned, because in one of the Where’s Waldo? drawings a beach is shown featuring a woman lying on the sand with part of her breast showing. It was actually just a side view of her breast, with a penciled-in microscopic nipple shown.
Do you realize the meticulous research and hours of time it must have taken whoever discovered this “offensive” character amidst all the thousands and thousands of characters featured in a Waldo book?
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
This is the incredible story of an ever-hopeful and ever-wistful young girl who is eventually killed in the Holocaust. In some ways, it is the ultimate example of the ever-classic theme of “Good vs. Evil.” Or one very good person in the face of perhaps the greatest evil of the past several centuries. Yet despite her incredibly horrible enemies and fate, this remarkable teenage girl still believes in “the basic goodness of mankind.” Banned by the Alabama State Textbook Committee in 1983 for being “a real downer.”
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Like our pal Huck Finn, this book has been banned because of the free-flowing use of the “N” word. And like Twain’s book, it is used to paint an accurate picture of the period (and all its ignorance). It has been banned across America for “racial slurs” and for “promoting white supremacy.” Also because a parent thought the way “blacks are treated by members of [the] white community in a way that would upset black children.” Only ironic because never, but never, in the entire history of literature, has good and evil been so clearly portrayed and delineated. Real (not ersatz) racism is shown under a clear magnifying glass, in all its vicious cruelty.
(As a sidebar, to those of you who do not like reading -definitely see the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is without question one of the greatest movies ever made. One of those rare times “the movie is equally as great as the book it is based upon.”)
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books are far and away the most banned books of the past decade. Extremely ironic in that the Harry Potter series has probably inspired more young people to read than all the Hooked on Phonics and Pizza Hut books in the world.
Also one other point for all those people who have worked so tirelessly to ban these highly-popular books: strip away the magic and the Dr. Seuss creatures and the wizards and sorcerers, and ultimately the series boils down to the message that love, understanding, and tolerance are the most important things in the world.
8. Little Red Riding Hood
(You can’t make this stuff up, folks!)
Little Red Riding Hood has been banned for the use of alcohol (one of the items in Red Riding Hood’s basket is a bottle of wine).
9. Sleeping Beauty
The fairy tale was banned for promoting witchcraft and magic.
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
This classic was banned for “vulgar language.”
11. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Why do I feel like I am writing a Monty Python sketch? Could there possibly be a more harmless, innocuous book than Harriet the Spy? O.K. this one was banned because it “teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk, and curse.”
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
This book was banned in the South during the Civil War because of its anti-slavery content. Well, heck, that was over 150 years ago. Fortunately, as we all know, man has come a long way since those days of ignorance.
Are
CliffsNotes (well, it ws Cliff's Notes when I was in school) still too
long for you?
Then you need this: RinkWorks' Book-A-Minute website where you can catch up on all the classic literature you've been meaning to read. For example:
The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield: “Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.”Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mr. Darcy: "Nothing is good enough for me."
Ms. Elizabeth Bennet: "I could never marry that proud man."
(They change their minds.)
Link - via Flavorwire
Previously on Neatorama: Movie-A-Minute (by the same people)
The Republic High School in Missouri recently banned Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. In response, the Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering the students a free copy of the novel so they can read it on their own and draw their own conclusions. According to the library’s representative:
We have up to 150 books to share, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor… We’re not telling you to like the book… we just want you to read it and decide for yourself.
Link Via The Mary Sue
A few months ago I wrote an article on non-literary uses for books. If you liked that post, you’d certainly appreciate this great post on WebUrbanist detailing 12 cool artists that use books as their mediums.
If you’re a bookworm like I am then you’ll probably love this collection of books we love written by people we probably wouldn’t. Yeah, Roald Dahl’s on the list, right alongside a Nobel winner, a couple of notable poets, and a German metaphysical philosopher.
We like to think of our favorite writers as people we would get along with. So much of what attracts us to literature and philosophy is its author’s stated or implied worldview that it’s disturbing to find out that the writers we love have lived morally questionable — or even reprehensible — lives.
In the spirit of hating the author but loving the work, we’ve rounded up a collection of great books by poets, novelist, and philosophers with unsettling biographies.
Check out the rest of the gallery at Flavorwire. Link
When people talk about literary loves, they mention Rhett and Scarlet, Heathcliff and Catherine, or Romeo and Juliet. It’s about time some more modern love stories joined them. The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog assembled a list of modern novels with great love stories. If you haven’t read these, this might be the nudge you need! For example: The Solitude of Prime Numbers.
When Alice and Mattia first meet in grade school, they realize that they have one thing in common–they are not yet ready for love. Both have been shaped by profound childhood tragedies that crippled their trust in the world around them. But years later, they eventually learn to trust each other enough to overcome their awkwardness. The Solitude of Prime Numbers is an absolutely flawless literary debut from one of Italy’s most promising new authors and the romance between Alice and Mattia–unconventional though it may be–is one for the history books.
Meet the lovers of nine more modern novels you may want to explore. Link
Storytellers drew inspiration from the people passing through Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand. The stories were projected on a large screen, where folks could see themselves woven into the stories. The stunt was a promotion for the BNZ Literary Awards. Link -Thanks, Jono Aidney!
In July, Sotheby’s of London will auction off the only handwritten Jane Austen manuscript in private hands. It’s the unfinished novel The Watsons, which some say Austen might have completed if it weren’t so close to her own family life.
The Watsons manuscript shows how Austen’s other manuscripts must have looked. It also shines an interesting light on how she worked. Austen took a piece of paper, cut it in two and then folded over each half to make eight-page booklets. Then she would write, small neat handwriting leaving little room for corrections – of which there are many. “You can really see the mind at work with all the corrections and revisions,” said Heaton.
At one stage she crosses so much out that she starts a page again and pins it in. It seems, in Austen’s mind, her manuscript had to look like a book. “Writers often fall into two categories,” said Heaton. “The ones who fall into a moment of great inspiration and that’s it and then you have others who endlessly go back and write and tinker. Austen is clearly of the latter variety. It really is a wonderful, evocative document.”
The Watsons was written in 1804, not a hugely happy time for Austen professionally – she had one novel rejected and another bought by a publisher who failed to print it.
The manuscript is expected to bring between £200,000 and £300,000. Link -via Holy Kaw!
Comments Off I know you Neatoramanauts are a smart bunch, so I know most of you would rather read a book than destroy it. That being said, there are still far too many books in this world that are destroyed or contain terrible stories. Even if you like a book, you might end up with a copy you just can’t get rid of because there have already been 10 million copies of that book printed. So if you have a few extra titles you have no further use for, here are a few ways you can still use your books even after the words inside have lost their value.
Before I get started, I want to give a special thank you to WebEcoist and WebUrbanist, who provided a wealth of inspiration and research to this article.
Starting on the big scale uses for leftover books, you can build entire structures with them. While Slovakian artist Matej Krén’s building inside The Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (above) may not be structurally sound enough to exist outside another building, the Yellow Pages building (below) might be able to hold its own in a storm. Students from the Dalhousie University Department of Architecture in Nova Scotia built the house using a few wooden and metal beams to hold the thick books in place.
Of course, even if a book building could survive the elements, it would soon become subject to destruction via mold and insects.
Just because your home can’t be made completely from books doesn’t mean they can’t improve your home though. According to Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine, books are an excellent form of insulation, so even if you don’t want to read certain titles any more, they still can be useful for filling up bookshelves that line the exterior-facing walls of your home.
Gallery 1988 in L.A. is currently exhibiting covers to classic books… but not the covers you’ve seen lining shelves at Barnes & Noble. Forty-five artists have re-imagined the art with amazing results. I love Anne Benjamin‘s Pride and Prejudice, above, but The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Dirk Fowler is also awesome and James Flames‘ The Velveteen Rabbit gives me chills. You can check it out online, but if you’re in the L.A.-area, the Melrose exhibition runs through April 30.
Link via Flavorwire
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We showed you 13 Hilarious Peeps Candy Easter Dioramas and led you to Sci-Fi Peeps Dioramas, but since it’s the season for Peeps, there are always more! Check out a roundup of Peeps dioramas that aspire to what we call high culture: scenes of artists, art galleries, famous artworks, and literary references, and a symphony as well, in this collection of pictures from the Chicago Tribune’s competitions at mental_floss. Shown here is a marshmallow version of Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles. Link
A classic in modern literature, “The Lottery” did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters. Here’s how Shirley Jackson outraged a nation with fewer than 3,500 words.
Spoiler alert: this article reveals the ending of “The Lottery”. If you haven’t read it, hop to it! It’ll take 15 minutes, tops.
In 1948, The New Yorker published the most controversial short story in its history: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a 31-year-old wife and mother living in Vermont. The simply told tale covers a ritual lottery in a sunny, rural town. But what starts out bathed in warmth and charm grows eerier and eerier, until the horrific purpose of the lottery is revealed in the story’s final paragraphs. Soon after the piece was published, angry letters poured in to The New Yorker. Readers canceled their subscriptions. And while many claimed they didn’t understand the story, the intense reaction indicated they understood it all too well.
“The Lottery” was published at a time when America was scrambling for conformity. Following World War II, the general public wanted to leave behind the horrors of war and genocide. They craved comfort, normalcy, and old-fashioned values. Jackson’s story was a cutting commentary on the dangers of blind obedience to tradition, and she threw it, like a grenade, into a complacent post-war society.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Shirley Jackson was not the kind of person you’d expect to be a literary firebrand. Shy and high-strung, she dropped out of the University of Rochester in 1935. Her second stab at school was more successful. At age 20, she enrolled at Syracuse University, where she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Together, they published a short-lived literary magazine called The Spectre.
After graduating from Syracuse, the two got married and moved to New York City, where Jackson gave birth to the first of her four children. Soon after, in 1945, Hyman got a job teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. The family moved to North Bennington, a tiny, rural town that later became the setting for “The Lottery.” While Stanley taught, Jackson wrote. She penned a few offbeat stories for The New Yorker, but mostly she produced mainstream pieces for women’s periodicals such as Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal. After several years of living in Vermont, Jackson had another child and was carrying a third. From a distance, her life seemed tranquil and wholesome. But something darker was brewing inside.
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UK’s Royal Mail released a new set of postage stamps this week featuring famous wizards, witches, and enchanters from legend and literature. The eight stamps depict Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Aslan, the White Witch, Nanny Ogg, Rincewind, Volemort, and Dumbledore. See them all in a gallery at The Guardian. Link -via The Daily What
Your knowledge of American literature will be sorely tested in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Eleven Americans have won the Nobel Prize for literature. You get to match their names with a statement that describes him or her. I only got five right, for a score of 45%. I am so ashamed. Link
Comments Off I’ve always enjoyed an occasional Sherlock Holmes story, but it wasn’t until I took a class on the subject that I learned just how strange many of the tales are. From crazed Mormons to ape men to vampires, Conan Doyle’s heroic detective encounters some seriously strange cases in his time. In celebration of 124 years of inspired mysteries, here are a few of his weirdest tales. There are spoilers here, so if you plan to read any of these stories, you may want to skip past this one.
The first Sherlock Holmes story may very well be one of the weirdest. It starts out with the apprehension of a double murder suspect in London. As he explains his motives for the killings, we are told about a man named John Ferrier and a young girl named Lucy, who are the sole survivors of a group of an ill-fated wagon train and are both dying of thirst. Fortunately, a band of Mormons led by Brigham Young comes by and offers to save them, as long as they agree to convert to Mormonism and come with the group to start a new “promised land.”
John adopts Lucy and while the two have happily converted to the Mormon way of life, he has secretly sworn to never let her marry a Mormon, where she will only be one of many wives. Years later, she falls in love with a traveling man named Jefferson Hope. The two are engaged and the wedding is planned to take place in three months, when Jefferson returns from a trip he must take for his job.
After Jefferson leaves, John is approached by Brigham Young who tells him Lucy must marry a Mormon. He says she can take a month to make her choice between two eligible men in the town. John sends for Jefferson to return and save Lucy. He arrives on the last day before she must make her choice and Lucy, John and Jefferson sneak away. While on the run, Jefferson leaves one day to hunt for food and returns to the camp to find John dead and Lucy missing. He returns to the town and discovers Lucy was forced to marry one of the two Mormon men. A month later, Lucy dies. Jefferson sneaks into the house the night before the funeral and removes her wedding ring. He then swears revenge, stalking the town and almost killing the two men many times.
The “best” hangovers are, of course, fictional, since there are really no good hangovers. But witnessing the misery in this list may make you more cautious about overdoing the New Year partying and give you a laugh besides. Here’s how Tom Wolfe described a hangover in Bonfire of the Vanities:
“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” The fictional British journalist is reputed to be based on Christopher Hitchens
The slide show from The Guardian has more hangovers described poetically and painfully. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Mandy J. Watson took text from ten classic novels and generated word clouds in fonts and colors that portray the feeling of the novel. The results are pictures that are quite familiar to those who have read these works. In addition to The Wizard of Oz shown here, see Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, The Time Machine, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and others. Link
Comments Off I don’t know about you guys, but I am super excited to catch the new Harry Potter movie! While critics of the series often complain that Rowling didn’t come up with most of the magical aspects of the story herself, they seem to be missing the point: rather than creating an alternate world where magic is real and wild beasts roam the countryside, she created a mythology that allows these fantasy elements to exist in our world, just out of sight of ordinary muggles like ourselves. To create this goal, it actually makes sense that she would use mythologies of cultures from around the world, as it allows the mythologies to work with the stories –muggles have seen dragons and unicorns in the past, but the wizarding community has hidden these things so well in the last centuries that muggles now accept them to be nothing more than stories.
To create this world within our world, Rowling had to do a lot of research into an array of mythologies and stories from all over the globe. She once explained, “children know that I didn’t invent unicorns, but I’ve had to explain frequently that I didn’t actually invent hippogriffs.” So what are some of the mythologies incorporated into her stories? Lets take a look, starting with those hippogriffs.
Image via Ben Dodson [Flickr]
Fans of the series are undoubtedly familiar with Buckbeak, the hippogriff that Harry and Hermoine saved from execution, but as Rowling pointed out, many people don’t realize that hippogriffs have been around much longer than the book series. The creatures entered the public consciousness in medieval times, where they were said to be a cross between a griffin and a horse. The cross breed creature was said to be even stronger, faster and more intelligent than either of its parents and could travel as fast as lightening. Fortunately, they were said to be much easier to tame than griffins, which is why Buckbeak was so willing to be ridden in the novels.
Hippogriffs were exceptionally rare beasts, largely because griffins considered horses to be food. In fact, the concept was considered to be so outlandish that “to mate griffins with horses” was a similar expression to “when pigs fly.” For this reason, hippogriffs were considered a symbol not only of impossibility, but of intense love.
Grindylows were one of the many dark creatures Harry had to face during his competition in the Triwizard Tournament. The nasty little creatures are known to live in the bottom of Hogwarts Lake and try to pull anyone who comes into their territory down to the bottom of the lake.
These creatures originally started being talked about in the English counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, but their myth spread throughout England and Ireland, where they were used to scare children from pools, marshes and ponds in order to prevent drowning. Stories said that if a child came too close to the edge, the grindylows would grab them and pull them down to the water’s darkest depths.
Image via Giovanni Dall’Orto [Wikipedia]
The basilisk that almost took down Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets was monstrously large, stretching almost 50 feet, and at least 50 years old. Rowling credits the creation of the basilisk to Herpo the Foul, who hatched a chicken egg under a toad.
Classic tales of basilisks vary quite a bit from those of the Harry Potter universe. While both of the creatures can kill with a single glance and are exceptionally poisonous, Rowling’s 50 foot serpent is quite a bit larger than traditional basilisks, which were no more than five feet long (although they seemed to get longer as the stories aged). Notably, the creation of a basilisk in classic stories is through a rooster hatching a toad egg, if a toad hatched a chicken egg, a cockatrice (a similar creature with wings) would be born.
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You read the books, but not all characters are likable (just like real life). This list will no doubt spark discussion both for who it includes and for who it omits. I won’t tell you who is number one, but you know Scarlet O’Hara is on this list. Melanie made it, too.
4.) Scarlett O’Hara
Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
For every fan who finds Scarlett O’Hara romantic and admirable, there is another who thinks her a selfish, altogether loathsome figure with few redeeming qualities.
48.) Melanie Hamilton Wilkes
Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
Along with chief romantic rival Scarlett O’Hara, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes garners quite a bit of hatred as well. Many readers think of her as far too perfect to be relatable, insufferable at worst and boring at best.
Which literary characters do you really dislike? Link -via Interesting Pile
We’re thrilled to announce a new sub-blog we’re launching today, BitLit. Bit, as in binary digits, Lit, as in literature! As far as we know, this is unique to the blogosphere in that we’ll be serializing entire novels and short stories—even some poetry, many published by major publishers like Random House. Every day, a new chapter until the entire story is complete.
Plus, we’ll be interviewing authors and having contests to give away free, autographed copies of their books!
Today, we launch with three stories:
The first is an amazing short story called Nomen Ludi by Rob Beschizza, our pal over at boingboing. If you’re a fan of old computer games, like those created for the Amstrad CPC, if you love that kind of nostalgia, you’re going to love this one. You can read the entire story right here.
Next, we present the critically acclaimed, Frostbite, by David Wellington. Nipped by a wolf during an Arctic camping expedition, Cheyenne Clark suddenly finds herself feeling ferally frisky when the moon is up in Wellington’s far from routine werewolf tale. It turns out that Monty Powell, the loner who gives Chey refuge, is no ordinary guy, but the werewolf who turned her. But then Chey is no ordinary camper: she was sent to draw Monty out by a band of professional hunters who want the oil beneath the vast acreage Monty prowls—and to avenge the death of her father, whom Monty coincidentally slaughtered two decades before. Check out chapter 1 right here.
Finally, a novel that our own David K. Israel co-penned with author Jennifer Byrne called Trivial Pursuits, a novel that follows two protagonists as they try to come to grips with loss. Fareed is a 15-year-old Druze boy living in an RV cruising around Los Angeles with his father and trying to land a spot on the Jeopardy! Teen-tour. His world soon collides with Eos, an older girl who he quickly befriends and who is able to help him accept his mother’s death. Meanwhile Amy, who lives miles away in the Valley, is trying to deal with the loss of her infant-daughter. She relies on the help of an extra-marital lesbian affair that might quite possibly be her undoing. Start with Chapter 1, right here.
There are only so many hours in the day, and if you’re an evil villain, there’s too much dirty work to do.
So you get a henchman. But you can’t just let him out there all alone. It’s a big dark scary world, and he barely even has a name, much less any characterization! He needs a buddy.
Bonus points if the buddy is the physical opposite of the other, skinny where he is fat, or short where he is tall. Extra bonus points if you can use them as stand-ins to personify a much larger fighting force.
Often they are the funniest part of the story, and certainly have more personality than the evil overlord they work for. Revisit some of your favorites in this expandable list from Geekosystem. Link
Etsy artist Chet Phillips has created a set of dogs and cats as famous authors. Or are they famous authors portrayed as cats and dogs? Anyway, these Literary Pets are sold as prints or sets of trading cards. Shown are H.P. Lovecat and Spaniel Defoe. Link
Wouldn’t you love to know someone like the inventors in our movies and books -someone who can come up with gadgets, materials, and machines to solve your problems? Of course, in some stories inventors cause the problem themselves! Gizmodo takes a look at these geniuses from movies, TV, and literature and why we love them. My vote goes to Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who invented
The flux capacitor, the core component of a machine that allowed Brown to travel through time. Brown came up with the idea of the capacitor on November 5, 1955, and worked tirelessly for the next 30 years developing it into a working time machine. The capacitor, which requires 1.21 Gigawatts of electrical power to function, was first implemented in a customized DeLorean and later, or maybe earlier?, in a 19th century train.
1. June 16, 1904. 8:00 a.m. Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher, speaks to his friend, “stately, plump” Buck Mulligan, in the disused watchtower on the Liffey where they live.
James Joyce’s Ulysses dummified. The convoluted novel is reduced to 18 captioned cartoons.
Link – via Coudal Partners
The flesh-eating reanimated dead exist in ancient writings, in folklore, in news accounts, and in movies. What is it about these creatures that captures our imagination?
Representations of the flesh-hungry undead have been common throughout world mythology. While this includes the deformed and cannibalistic, though still living, ghoul and the blood draining vampire, the zombie in its more common, modern form has appeared in tales dating all the way back to 1000 BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature, which was recorded on twelve clay tablets, written in Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq. Like most epics it records a struggle between a hero, Gilgamesh, and the Gods, as he undertakes quests which displease his spiritual overlords. It is in the sixth tablet that the zombie is alluded to when the Goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead who will outnumber and devour the living. The dead do not actually rise in the epic; however it is the first overt mention in recorded literature of the zombie we know today.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by vedran84.
I know, it’s that tired old advice your mom has always given you: quitters never prosper; if you fall off the horse, get back on; finish what you started. But these authors are proof that just because you get rejected by a publisher or two (or three or 27) doesn’t mean you don’t have a classic on your hands.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is now studied in schools across the world. Time magazine ranked it as one of the top 100 English-language novels ever written. The book has sold more than 14.5 million copies since it was first published in 1954. And Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature largely based on this particular work. So I bet the guy who read the original manuscript for it and declared it, “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull” spent much of his career regretting his words.
The same could be said about George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It also made Time’s list of best English-language books ever written, ranked in at #31 on the Modern Library’s List of Best 20th-Century Novels, and won retrospective Hugo award in 1996. But not only was Orwell’s classic written off (and completely misunderstood) by a publisher who noted, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” Orwell’s peer and good friend T.S. Eliot was also less than impressed. Orwell sent a draft to Eliot, who responded that the writing was good, but the view was “not convincing” and that publishers would only accept the book if they had personal sympathy for the “Trotskyite” viewpoint.
Moving on to a modern classic, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Plenty of publishers took a gander at the Chosen One and decided not to choose him, including bigwigs like Penguin and HarperCollins. Jo Rowling finally decided to try a small London firm called Bloomsbury, who accepted only after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter read the book and declared it a winner. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about all of the accolades and great commercial success that followed nearly immediately.
I’m not a big fan of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books myself, but there’s obviously an audience out there – there are now more than 105 titles under the Chicken Soup heading (including Chicken Soup for the Chiropractic Soul), they’ve been translated into 54 languages and there are more than 100 million copies in print. Who would have ever guessed that the book was turned down 33 times in a row before it found a willing publisher? Among the 33 rejections included gems like, “anthologies don’t sell,” and “too positive.”
Some authors like to get their digs in at the publishers who told them they were not marketable. e.e. Cummings, for example, couldn’t find a publisher for 70 Poems, so he borrowed $300 from his mom and printed it himself. But he got his digs in when he wrote a “poem” called “No Thanks,” arranged it to look like a funerary urn, and put it on the dedication page of 70 Poems. The “poem” consisted entirely of the publishers that had rejected him, including Simon & Schuster, Harcourt, Random House, Viking Press and Scribner.
Gone With the Wind – one of the most enduring novels and movies of all time, of course. There aren’t too many people who haven’t heard the phrase, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But it was 38 publishers who didn’t give a damn originally. When Margaret Mitchell finally found a publisher in Macmillan (Macmillan also published White Fang and Call of the Wild), the book sold in stores for $3 apiece – quite a sum for 1936. Even at this rather high price point, the book sold more than one million copies by the end of the year. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and of course became an Academy Award-winning film in 1939.
“His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so,” is what one publisher said about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. After it came out in 1957, The New York Times wrote a review that basically stated the exact opposite opinion: “The most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance” of the generation. At least one author agreed with the rejector’s assessment of the novel, though: Truman Capote, who said of Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
It was actually thanks to a critic that Norman Bridwell finally got published. The author of Clifford the Big Red Dog had tried multiple publishers and was told repeatedly that his dog pictures were boring and unoriginal. One editor finally told him to create a story to go along with his illustrations in hopes that the story might spark a little more interest. So he did, and less than a month later, Scholastic Books sent Bridwell a contract to publish everyone’s favorite house-sized dog.
There aren’t many teenage girls who haven’t read at least one or two Judy Blume books. But according to Blume herself, she received nothing but rejections for about two years straight. Remember Highlights for Children magazine? She repeatedly tried to get pieces published with them; they liked to send back a form letter with all of the reasons checked as to why she was rejected. “Does not win in competition with others,” was always one of the reasons. Blume says she still can’t look at Highlights without wincing.
