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Fifty Shades of Grey parody gets publisher

How does E.L. James know she’s really arrived? Not because her Twilight-inspired work of fan fiction was transmogrified into a bona fide mainstream phenomenon. Not because she scored a lucrative deal with a major publishing house. Not because of her spot atop The New York Times bestseller list. Not even because she was responsible for ushering an unfortunate new term “ “mommy porn” “ into the lexicon.

She can be assured she’s arrived because her erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, has spawned a parody. And that parody has itself landed a publisher.

According to the NYT, Da Capo Press has signed satirist Andrew Shaffer’s book, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey, which apparently took the author all of 10 days to write:

The timing of his Grey parody couldn’t be better. E. L. James’s best-selling book and its two sequels, on which it is based, has stoked a media frenzy. Modern feminists and others have criticized the bondage-themed books for their archaic portrayal of women ” specifically the book’s heroine, a young virgin who is swept off her feet by a billionaire sadist.

Mr. Shaffer was among the early mainstream critics. Most of the little things that hurt my head about #50shadesofgrey could have been fixed by a good editor, he wrote on Twitter in March.

He also calls the premise an outdated romantic trope. The heroine is so clueless ” not only is she a virgin, she’s never even masturbated, he said in a phone interview. Her validation comes from everything this man teaches her.

This is not Shaffer’s first foray into the world of parody. People on Twitter might know him better for his two alter egos, Evil Wylie (a villainous version of feared superagent Andrew Wylie) and Emperor Franzen (a villainous version of somewhat less-feared best-selling author Jonathan Franzen).