To make Jane Austen and Bronte more appealing to readers raised on Twilight and the Hunger Games series, publishers are repackaging the classics to give them more sex appeal. Sometimes the references aren’t so thinly veiled—HarperCollins released an edition of Wuthering Heights with the inscription, “Bella & Edward’s favorite book.”
As if a fatwa weren’t enough, Iranian video game designers are continuing their campaign against Salman Rushdie in pixels. They have reportedly “completed initial phases of production” of the game “The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict,” according to the Guardian. Though details about the game’s plot haven’t been released, the New York Daily News speculates that “the new video game will have Iranian youth chasing down and killing the author in the West...” (We’d like to note that if a recent profile of the hard-partying Rushdie in the New York Times is any indication, the controversial author’s life doesn’t seem all that stressful.)
According to Janet Groth, a New Yorker receptionist for twenty-one years, there were upsides and downsides to working at the magazine during the sixties and seventies. While women had to deal with office misogyny and daytime drinking was still common, the institution did pay for its employees’ psychoanalysis.
A rare copy of Agatha Christie’s story collection Poirot Investigates (1924) sold for a record-breaking £40,630 at an auction at the Dominic Winter auction house, according to the Guardian. The collection marked the first appearance of detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s fiction (and this particular edition marked the first time Poirot was depicted on a dust jacket) and sold for at least £35,000 more than predicted.
An ingenious new blog, the Underground New York Public Library, judges subway riders by the books they read on the train.
What has Faulkner really left us? Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan examines the great Southern writer’s literary legacy.
