The Jane Austen Book & Gun Club

Pride and Extreme Prejudice photo by Les Howard

I don't usually find firearms very amusing, but you have to love this. Plus, I'm reading Sense and Sensibility right now. Perhaps there's something about these Penguin hardcover classics that makes one yearn for large-caliber weapons? (Thanks, Sara E.!)

Now THAT'S specific.

Via.

I was at Powell's bookstore the other day, where I was stunned to see six shelves of books devoted to "Jane Austen Pastiche."

But as you can see from this Vampire Holiday Romance section, things can get even MORE niche-y than that!

Bad Dog

Ooh, and I have the first line from the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Tender Is the Night...of the Living Dead

There's only one way to say this: One of Jane Austen's most beloved novels will be re-titled, adapted, and released soon as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. From the publisher:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton— and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers— and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this... edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

One wonders how the copy writer avoided ending with “…new legions of undead fans.” While the Guardian is skeptical about this enterprise, many readers responded enthusiastically, and came up with their own ideas for similar reinterpretations:

—Pride and Putrefaction, Jane Austen
—Great Eviscerations, Charles Dickens
—To the Lighthouse...for BRAIIIIIINS, Virginia Woolf
—Zom Bixote, Cervantes
—Voyage of the Dawn-of-the-Undeader, C.S. Lewis
—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Zombie, Proust
—The Naked and the Undead, Norman Mailer
—Breakfast on Tiffany's Brains, Truman Capote
—The Brains of Wrath, John Steinbeck
—Les Zombies Miserables, Victor Hugo
—Are You There, God? It's Me, Zombie Margaret, Judy Blume

Traversing Literature: From Amusingly Overrated to LOL to Laughable

Election Special: The New York Times recently asked the all-important question: What is the most "lol" novel of all time? The editors of the Book Review section named their top vote-getter: Lucky Jim.

Said editors clearly have egg white in their veins. Kingsley Amis’s satire of neurotic intellectuals and English academic life is the funniest novel EVER? [Amis, below.] Heck, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a better comic novel than Lucky Jim, and it's NOT a comic novel! Still, it certainly made me laugh... when I wasn’t cringing or reaching for my Spanish dictionary. (And off the top of my head, both Motherless Brooklyn and Catch-22 are much funnier than Lucky Jim.)

Writing in the Guardian, Diane Shipley noted the dearth of recognition in the Times for funny female authors. Shipley’s list of possibilities (Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen [above], Marian Keyes) left out Dorothy Parker, but then Parker's longer works were less well known than her withering one-liners and morbid poems. Examples?

Regarding a book she had not enjoyed, Parker wrote, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” And as to poetry:

It costs me never a stab nor squirm/To tread by chance upon a worm./“Aha, my little dear,” I say,/“Your clan will pay me back some day.”

Wait, I know what woman author is the funniest: Ayn Rand! I’ll never forget my astonishment at reading the much bally-hooed tandem of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. But I guess that "lol" and "laughable" aren’t really the same thing, are they?

Last Thing: Hmm, I thought this entry would somehow turn into an "election special," but it has failed to do so. :)