New Jane Austen family papers made available for public viewing

The good news is that a slate of Jane Austen family books, previously available only to academics, has been digitized and is being offered for viewing by members of the public. The bad news, depending upon your geographic circumstances, is that the material is available by appointment only, and only at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, England. (Steventon, Hampshire, is Austen’s birthplace.)

From the BBC:

The “rare and precious” material includes digital copies of eight music books known to have been enjoyed by the author, a manuscript verse book given to her sister Cassandra in 1837, and a notebook containing her niece Caroline’s recollections.

The original copies have also been moved to the records office for “safe-keeping” after previously being held at the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire.

The BBC offers no indication that the material includes corroborating evidence for Lindsay Ashford’s supposition that Austen died as a result of arsenic poisoning.

Book links round-up: unfinished manuscripts, Kobo gets ready to rumble, and more

• Pitchfork Media staff lists top 60 music books including Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love
• Muhammad Ali sues Kobo for using famous slogan without consent
• The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference is coming this October
• Will Borders be liquidated?
• Unfinished Jane Austen manuscript sold for $1.6-million
• Jason Zinoman’s new book Shock Value examines horror flicks from the 1970s

Quirk Classics reboots another masterpiece with Android Karenina

What better way to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death than by breathing new life into one of his classic works? After the unexpected success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it has become a truth universally acknowledged that a reader in possession of a Quirk Classics book must be in want of more Quirk Classics books.

Luckily for fans of the small U.S. publisher, it was announced yesterday that its fourth literary mash-up, Android Karenina, will be available on June 8. Co-authored by Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters scribe Ben H. Winters, the new novel will follow the “tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya” – but with a dystopian twist. From the publisher:

These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology – and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen.

According to Entertainment Weekly columnist Kate Ward, this departure from tried-and-true Austen classics comes just in time, as the slew of Austen-inspired remixes was becoming tired:

I completely, 100 percent supported the trend of Jane Austen mash-ups – until now. Can you say oversaturation? Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was hysterical, and wholly original. But the novelty has worn thin. [...]

Because, really, there are hundreds of other identifiable, classic authors whose work could use an imaginative update. Let’s leave Austen alone for once. Why not desecrate the work of John Steinbeck, Louisa May Alcott, or, hell, even Dante?

Hmm, a Dante remix, you say? I wonder how Ward would feel about Dante’s Inferno, the new release from EA Games available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PlayStation Portable on Feb. 9. Or even the video game tie-in edition of the book, set for release on Jan. 19 with 16 colour pages of art and an introduction by Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer.

However, if you still can’t get enough of the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies franchise, there’s more good news: Variety announced last month that Natalie Portman will star in and produce a film adaptation of the best-selling novel. Details have not yet been released, but check out this clever fan-made YouTube video of what the movie might look like.

Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate‘s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books? 

Publishers scramble to avoid the coming Dan Brown tsunami

Hollywood has made determining a film’s release date into a science. You don’t want to release a quirky little independent film opposite the new Transformers sequel because you’ll get crushed. Similarly, publishers are eyeing Sept. 15 with a certain amount of trepidation. That’s the day that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s long-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code, arrives in stores.

Because Doubleday, Brown’s publisher, has so much at stake with this novel (which is rumoured to have an English-language print run of an astounding 6.5 million copies), you can expect wall-to-wall media coverage surrounding the book’s release. Which means that other authors with competing books risk being shut out.

Writing on The Daily Beast blog, Sara Nelson points out that new novels by commercial writers Joseph Finder, Terry Brooks, and Larry McMurtry are all scheduled for August pubs, likely to avoid the Dan Brown juggernaut. Nelson writes:

As the number of media outlets covering books shrink, and as fewer stores – think Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com – control more of how books get promoted and displayed, you don’t want your little first novel (or your potential blockbuster, more likely) to be hit by an avalanche of Dan Brown articles, TV interviews,  and step ladders. “It’s standard procedure to try to determine when other houses are publishing important books,” says a marketing executive at Penguin. “We often change our dates accordingly.” That, and the need, ever more desperate, to make sure your book lands at the top of the dwindling number of bestseller lists; because those lists are relative, no self-respecting publisher would want to put his Patricia Cornwell, say, up against Twilight author Stephenie Meyer … so a good part of an agent/author’s job is manipulating that pub date.

One publisher unafraid to go head-to-head with Brown is Philadelphia-based Quirk Books, which is releasing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the follow-up to this year’s surprise bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on Sept. 15. Whether the gambit will pay off, or whether Sea Monsters will sink without a trace, remains to be seen.

Jane Austen, sea monsters, and Twilight comix: Enough already!!!

This Quillblogger will confess to finding the premise behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies irresistible: take Jane Austen’s most famous novel (and one of the least likely books ever to be associated with zombies), and drop in scenes of the undead feasting on human flesh. Sadly, the final product, “co-written” by Austen and American humourist Seth Grahame-Smith, failed to live up to the promise of its high concept.

But, 600,000+ consumers can’t be wrong, and the small Philadelphia-based publisher Quirk Books is planning to follow the success of its first mash-up with two (alright, one-and-a-half) new titles in a similar vein. October will see the release of a “Deluxe Heirloom” hardback of P&P&Z, but before that, the company plans to bastardize rework another Austen classic. According to a press release from the publisher, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which is to be released on Sept. 15 (the same day as the scheduled release of another piddling little title that’s sure to create little buzz) “expands the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures.” The new volume, “co-written” with Ben H. Winters, will feature more new material than its predecessor: instead of a ratio of 85:15 Austen-to-new content, the new book’s ratio will be 60:40.

Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak explains why the publisher decided to go with sea monsters over vampires in the new book:

A couple of publishers are crashing Jane Austen vampire novels that will no doubt capitalize on the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and there were certainly plenty of people who urged me to do the same. But I didn’t want to go out with the one-millionth vampire novel that’s going to be published this year. I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me. Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources – most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants! I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don’t think they will be disappointed.

One group that definitely doesn’t feel that the vampire genre is exhausted is Stephenie Meyer fans. And they have reason to get excited: Entertainment Weekly reports that there is a Twilight graphic novel on the way. This is no doubt going to sew controversy, since the characters’ appearances in the graphic novel are apparently not identical to either the descriptions in Meyer’s novels or the actors who portray them onscreen. Tina Jordan of EW writes:

What’s interesting to me is that it doesn’t look simply like an artist’s rendering of Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson. In fact, the characters seem to be an amalgam of Meyer’s literary imagination and the actors’ actual looks. The description of Edward from biology class: “His dazzling face was friendly; open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were cautious.” And Bella: “I was ivory-skinned … I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete…”

The publication date is still undetermined, so in the meantime, fans can ponder this: Who would win in a fight, Harry Potter, Edward Cullen, or Jane Austen? The comments are open: have at it.

THIS POST CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT HAS BEEN CORRECTED: Quillblog underestimated the popularity of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which has over 600,000 copies in print, not the 60,000 that was originally stated.

G.I. Poe

C. Max Magee at The Millions points us to the latest in lit fun: literary action figures.

While most kids were playing with G.I. Joes or Barbies, we at The Millions were more likely to have our nose in a book. Finally, there are molded plastic figurines for us too, though its not clear whether they are fully posable or offer kung-fu grip action. We’ll take what we can get. Who among us wouldn’t enjoy staging our own literary roundtables with the likes of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Dickens?

Magee doesn’t mention whether the figures come with a free inhaler refill and anti-wedgie kit.

For bonus wedgie points, The Millions also points us to a complete list of the Wikipedia entries updated and added to by author Nicholson Baker – a list that does not include, interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on Baker himself.

Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone

A recent list of must-read books for children compiled by the Britain’s Royal Society of Literature has raised a few eyebrows for its perceived slant toward the unnecessarily highbrow and difficult. The list of 30 titles — chosen by poet laureate Andrew Motion and authors J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman — included such titles as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A column in The Times has now called the list to task, claiming that it is exactly this type of prescriptive reading list that scares so many young people away from literature — often for life.

Columnist Carol Sarler claims to be one of those former students who lost her taste for good books after being forced to read so many of them while making her through the British school system of the 1960s. She read the assigned books, did well on her tests and essays, and then never read a work of literature again. Why? “Reading books was … the stuff of school in exactly the same way as was trigonometry or chucking a javelin — and since leaving my esteemed seat of learning, I am as likely to curl up with Jane Austen for the fun of it as I am to flirt with a cosine or risk the wrong end of a spear.” Sarler compares her schooling with that of her daughter’s, whose experience of the more reader-friendly (and much maligned) curriculum of recent years had an unexpected effect: “When child of mine left school she, too, relinquished teenage activities in favour of the new — but, do guess, what new did she find? Why, at the age of 18, there it was, laid out before her: the entirely unexplored landscape of literature, which she swooped upon with what would become and has remained a sincere delight.”

Related links:
Read the op-ed piece in The Times
Read the Royal Society list in The Guardian