You might have seen the new Little Women trailer by now. In a series of quick cuts, the eminently familiar faces of Emma Watson and Saoirse Ronan, as well as the faces of Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen, flash on the screen: 2019’s wholesome and soft-feminist embodiment of those four famous girls some of us know so well from childhood. Unobjectionable, right? A new book called March Sisters also comes out this year, containing the musings of four well-known writers on their relationships to the book’s protagonists. But what about the latest adaptation of Emily Dickinson‘s life, in which Hailee Steinfeld plays a punk-rock, badass Dickinson who writes about “wild nights”—and isn’t talking about religious ecstasy? For The Guardian, Adrian Horton asks how modernized should literary adaptations be? What liberties is it okay to take?
The Art of the Adaptation
Elizabeth Acevedo on Reading the Same Way You Eat
Books of a Southern Capital
As part of their efforts to explore new literary locales, the bloggers at Ploughshares took on Richmond, perhaps the only city to claim Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, and GWAR.
Appearing Elsewhere
My story “I am the Lion Now” is the Story of the Week at Narrative Magazine.
“History is filled with irony”
Casey N. Cep ponders oppositional forces at work on two statues harkening back to the days of Maryland’s slaveholders. “More than tragedy or romance, history is filled with irony,” she notes.
We Dare You
“The Dares. We’d been at them all summer: making each other do stuff, alone or together, just for the fun of it. Girls like us, with high GPAs and not a single boy looking our way, needed a little danger to get us through the summer.” Our own Edan Lepucki has a short story, “Ambulance of Boys,” on Storychord.com.
New Edith Wharton Discovered
A new short story by Edith Wharton has been discovered in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The nine-page story, “The Field of Honour,” takes place in 1915. We reflect on Wharton’s work.