“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up. She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”
The Vampire Diaries
Coming to a Bookstore Near You
Check out this clever book trailer for the debut novel House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni.
Another Dossier
“Part of what I realize now I was doing in Proxies was to integrate the incongruous aspects of my self: the child of the truck driver and Primitive Baptist self, the queer intellectual poet self, the professor without an office self, the prizewinner who was ‘midcareer’ before he was ’emerging,’ the middle-aged man at the entry-level rungs of the gig economy.” Go check out this interview with Brian Blanchfield over at The Rumpus. This is the second Blanchfield interview we’ve told you about, both worth taking a look.
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New York: It Isn’t All That
Roxane Gay rounded up some of her favorite writers from “Outside of New York City.” (And she’s not talking about Brooklyn.)
Thoughts of a Migraineur
“Stories are born unconsciously, but I think the writer determines whether the turn a book has taken is true or false through feeling, which is conscious. I shape my stories in this or that way because the story answers something that is emotionally rather than literally true for me.” At Full-Stop, Siri Hustvedt talks fiction with Tyler Malone.
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A Guide to a Guide
A few days ago, our own Edan Lepucki talked shop with Millions contributor Ramona Ausubel, whose new collection, A Guide to Being Born, came out last month. Now, at Full-Stop, Emily Oppenheimer reviews the book, which she says refuses to “make use of the obvious perspective.”
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“I don’t love women writers enough to teach them.”
Millions alumna Emily M. Keeler interviewed author David Gilmour for Hazlitt’s Shelf Esteem blog. In the process (and perhaps because he was distracted by “a Frenchman”) the author voiced some opinions on female authors that have been called “ill-informed,” “careless and offensive,” and “staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial.” The ongoing kerfuffle prompted Hazlitt to share the unedited transcript from Keeler’s interview, and it’s clear that Gilmour’s remarks were not taken out of context.
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Realia
“After scanning across this listing while doing cursory research for something else, I instantly became obsessed with the idea of the zebra skin in the library. What, exactly, did it look like? How was it stored amongst his papers? Why had he owned it? What was it doing in the special collections of an academic library?” On looking through the archives of William Gaddis.
Am I the only one that wants to take way too much Ambien over terrible vampire stories being compared to Dickens?
No. I’m with you. Though it is true that the site of suffering for young people in contemporary popular entertainment is high school (My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the loathesome Vampire Diaries), whereas Dickensian and Brontean child heroes usually did their suffering elsewhere–the streets of London, workhouses, remote bleak English landscapes, etc. (not always true though; in Nicholas Nickleby there’s that horrible Yorkshire school, Dotheboys Hall, and there’s Lowood in Jane Eyre).
Vampires Diaries, by the way, was godawful. Made me think better of Twilight–which I firmly believed impossible. Mary McNamara’s review was much more entertaining than the show itself. My apologies to any who might have taken a look.
Honestly, I liked this show. It stays very true to the novels yet includes the audience expectancies. One thing I know for sure: It’s way better than Twilight!