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
Boys in Zinc
Granta has published translated writing from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. She writes: “In 1986 I had decided not to write about war again. For a long time after I finished my book War’s Unwomanly Face I couldn’t bear to see a child with a bleeding nose. I suppose each of us has a measure of protection against pain; mine had been exhausted. Two events changed my mind.” Find out more about Alexievich here.
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This Week in Literary Journals
The latest issues of Barrelhouse and Big Bridge are online, free, and ready for your perusal.
If A Boy Could Dream
“I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer.” Ocean Vuong on immigrating into English and the first poem he ever wrote.
This is Your Brain on Austen
What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
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