Comic of the Week: Over at Electric Lit, check out Grant Snider’s comic on why we ban books. We look at The Lorax and other dangerous books in honor of Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week
James Franco is Allen Ginsberg
Book to movie news: Soon to hit theaters is a big-screen take on Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, focusing on the obscenity trial Ginsberg faced after the publication of the poem and starring James Franco as Ginsberg (alongside Jon Hamm and Jeff Daniels). (The trailer). The film includes an animation of the poem itself by illustrator Eric Drooker. Art from the animation has been collected in a new book under the title Howl: A Graphic Novel.
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The Shakespeare Oxford Society
Unsurprisingly, the Oxfordian theory-inspired blockbuster Anonymous is ruffling some feathers in college English departments. The “Shakespeare Oxford Society,” of course, has a rejoinder.
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Exhausted by Celebrity
“Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs,” reports The Guardian. “About time,” we say.
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Literary Louisiana
In a piece for The New York Times Jennifer Moses takes a tour of south Louisiana, “a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words,” and of the past haunts of Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice and Kate Chopin.
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