The Austen Project, launched last year, asks prominent contemporary writers to reimagine Jane Austen’s classics in modern times. (Thus far, we’ve seen Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility and Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey.) In perhaps the most significant adaptation yet, Curtis Sittenfeld has announced that her Pride and Prejudice will feature a 39-year-old Jane Bennet. After all, Jane (23 in the original novel), is “pretty much teetering on the edge of spinsterhood.”
Jane at 40
Shakar’s Story Continues
The Observer picks up Luminarium author Alex Shakar’s narrative where his piece here at The Millions left off. (via @sarahw)
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Stars of Old Russia
In 1913, four years before the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II made the now-baffling claim that a writer named Teffi was the only major Russian writer. At the time, however, his endorsement made sense, because everybody in Russia, from royalty on down, read Teffi’s work and “delighted” in it. Until the revolution, at which point she was consigned to oblivion. William Grimes writes about a new collection of her stories.
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Hard to Categorize
The Naipaul Question, as Morgan Meis calls it, is simple: is V.S. Naipaul too offensive to be taken seriously? His recent biography includes scenes of abuse and moments of straightforward racism. But Meis thinks the issue is more complicated than whether Naipaul is a monster — the author is, in his phrasing, too “protean” to be pinned down.
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Hanif Abdurraqib on Writing to Survive the World
Abdurraqib discusses his new essay collection, A Little Devil in America, a celebration of Black culture through the lens of artists like Josephine Baker, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, and more.
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Jami Attenberg on the Call of Family
In her new novel, All This Could Be Yours, Jami Attenberg examines a family emerging from the shadow of their power-hungry patriarch
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The Fictive Wallpaper
Artist Julia Callon creates dioramas inspired by nineteenth-century works of fiction such as Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
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