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.” According to at least one Huntington, New York bookseller, the new editions are doing surprisingly well.
As if a fatwa weren’t enough, Iranian video game designers are continuing their campaign against Salman Rushdie in pixels. Video game designers 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. Plans for “Stressful Life” were first devised by the Islamic Student Association three years ago, and 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…” But 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) went 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 their book covers—specifically, the ones they’re carrying on the train. The site collects photos of people reading on the subway, as well as information about the books they’re engrossed in.
What has Faulkner really left us? John Jeremiah Sullivan examines the great Southern writer’s literary legacy.
It’s commonly repeated that languages are dying: one disappears every fourteen days, and more than seven thousand are predicted to vanish by the next century. But what does this look like up close? In the summer issue of National Geographic, Russ Rymer travels to Russia and India to witness the real-time disappearances of the languages Tuvan and Aka.
