Some flippin’ Genius (capital “G”) named Seth Grahame-Smith has had the greatest idea ever. Or ever-ish, anyway. He’s taken the classic novel Pride and Predjudice – fully in the public domain – and made it even better.
Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.
That’ll liven up the old English class, eh? I was thinking of creating my own adaptation — Crime and Punish and Ninjas. Too obvious?
Really, there’s no end to the public domain goodness.
After being blown away by Tony Earley’s first two novels, Jim the Boy and The Blue Star, I picked up what I believe to be his first book, a collection of short stories called Here We Are in Paradise.
While my first couple of experiences with Earley showed his talent for developing characters and tugging at the reader’s hearstrings in the context of a novel, Here We Are in Paradise shows that he honed his talents prior to that in the context of short stories — a much more difficult task – with equal success. The last three stories in this collection are about Jim Glass, the main character in Earley’s two novels, and so I was pre-disposed to like them (and I did). However, after reading the five stories that came before them, in which I got to explore characters that had nothing to do with Jim Glass, I felt so absorbed by Earley’s telling of these episodes that I would have loved the last three even if they were entirely new to me. Gettysburg and Lord Randall were my two favorites.
In summary, I don’t know where to tell you to start with Tony Earley; just start somewhere. As for me, just like what happened when I finished his other two works, I can’t wait to pick up what I think is his only other published work, Somehow Form a Family: Stories that are Mostly True.
Awesome, Books | Tim | 
February 3, 2009 8:09 am | 
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