Did Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation leave you feeling a little disappointed? Then consider Kate Kelsall’s short list of “utterly compelling cinematic adaptations” to be just what the doctor ordered.
“The Book Was Better.” Or Was It?
My Brah Horatio
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Reading Rooster
There are plenty of reading apps out there, but a company called Rooster has released another, this one designed to “allow users to consume bite-sized pieces of highly curated fiction” whenever they have a few spare moments. In an interview with BookBusiness, Yael Goldstein Love, the editorial director of the project, described Rooster as aiming “to bring immersive reading, particularly fiction reading, back into busy peoples’ lives.” It’s difficult to know how to feel about this. Of course we think busy people should read good fiction, but is this just a precursor to the inevitable change of literature in the face of growing technology and shortened attention spans?
Duke University Press Goes Digital
Even though HathiTrust is currently being sued by The Authors Guild and a few others, it’s recently partnered with Google and Duke University Press to digitize “a trove of older titles.”
Struck by Lightning
“Once certain hurdles are cleared (a bit of talent, years of work), being a writer is like flying a kite in a storm in a field full of people flying kites in a storm.” Garth Greenwell on writing his first novel, the importance of failure, and giving oneself privacy to make mistakes. Pair with Meredith Turits’s Millions piece, featuring six writers looking back on their first novels.
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Unfortunately, no mention of Blade Runner.
It’s tempting to make comparisons between a novel and its movie adaptation, but print and film are two disparate media. Each can do what the other cannot. Each has to be taken on its own terms, with its strengths and limitations. More on that here, with examples from Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day,’ Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and others: http://www.praguerevue.com/#!stirring-words-moving-images-when-novels-become-movies/cug1
Speaking of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ here is Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s most revered script writers (Chinatown, Shampoo etc) on why he steered clear of screen adaptations of Gatsby: https://twitter.com/ScottFeinberg/status/316836677664534528/photo/1