by Willa A. Cmiel For as much as we like to talk about and link to zombies here at Vol. 1, I really think the trend is, to put it nicely, pretty silly. To be truly frank, I actually find it immensely, offensively, near-tragically awful. (It’s true that I’ve written about this before.) Historically, zombie mythology originated in West Indian Voodoo lore, and was taken and misinterpreted by Western society (Night of the Living Dead). And then we took it […]
Online Comic Strip Figures Out Zombie-Lit Phenomenon
Turns out, it’s the boys who are to blame! Because the girls totally get it. Unshelved is an online comic book set in a public library. Every Sunday for “Book Club,” they publish a guest post, which features a different book every week. This week, Pride and Prejudice. Are zombies involved? Sea monsters?, one character wonders. No way!, says the other. Vol. 1 has discussed the zombie-lit trend in the past–more than once, in fact–and plans to continue doing so […]
Bites: Inglorious Wizerds, Keats on the big screen, Neil Gaiman’s library, Thurston on Gossip Girl, and more
“Dark wizard ain’t got no charms. They’re the foot-soldiers of a muggle-hatin’ mass-murderin’ maniac and they need to be destroyed.” Lit. John Keats gets the big screen treatment (thanks The Millions) Michael Kimball interviews Gary Lutz (Thanks The Faster Times) Well, now we know what Neil Gaiman’s library looks like (Thanks Boing Boing) “Jane Austen is dead. Get over it.” (Thanks Indichik) Deckfight pick their top five Southern novels, and take the ballsy route of excluding any Faulkner. Music “Ah, […]
Weekend Bites: New York nostalgia, Dzanc’s new lit mag, the Seinfeld effect, Jane Austen’s syllabus, bit.ly is bad?, Brooklyn’s Stairway to Heaven
For Bookforum, Philip Nobel’s review essay on The Eternal City: “Despite New Yorkers’ powerful nostalgia for the Gotham-that-was, the city’s urban ecology has always thrived on change.” There’s a new monthly online lit mag, The Collagist, by Dzanc Books. Field Guide to the Snob: The Seinfeld Effect. Like Jane Austen? Don’t read zombie lit! Read some of these books instead. Are shortened url’s bad for the health of the web? Finally, has Google found a Stairway to Heaven in Brooklyn??
Pride, Prejudice, and Satire
I first got word of Seth Grahame-Smith’s upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by way of the zombie horror genre “with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action” a few weeks ago. I squinted my eyes, considering. Ultimately, I ignored it, I moved on. But since blog posts and news articles about this novel have been relentlessly appearing in my Google Reader, it seems others are not doing the same. So, a zombie […]