In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one true believer exults.
Now some of the writer’s own words are getting reworked in Amazon’s vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway. Orwell’s reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not.
A contract killer, a two-bit swindler and a former Republican politician. What do they all have in common? They were all convicted criminals, and they all learned how to commit their crimes from instruction books available from Paladin Press’ catalog. If there ever was a university for prospective criminals to learn the trade, titles from Paladin would certainly be marked as “required reading.”
Four hours of Beatrix Potter, 10 hours of Marcel Proust, or 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes. How about every single word of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Silas Marner? Sound overwhelming? Radio bosses clearly think not – so much so they have commissioned a plethora of literary adaptations to delight growing numbers of fans of “the long listen”.
"Sometimes, I feel I got to get away," sang the Who in their 1965 single "The Kids Are Alright," and no wonder the song became an instant classic for the youth of Townshend and Daltrey's g-g-g-generation — teenagers of every age tend toward the restive, longing to experience life beyond whichever town or city they were raised in.
For 16-year-old Helen Dedleder and her group of misfit friends, that desire is especially urgent. The kids live in Rosary, Calif., a fictional town run by religious fundamentalists, and are almost completely cut off from the outside world. Their struggle to be themselves and support one another in a community built on intolerance and hatred forms the basis of gods with a little g, the sweet and triumphant second novel from author Tupelo Hassman.
Fairy tales are frank about cruelty. The witch eats children. A king kills out of churlish despotism. At the center of the tale is someone, often a child, picking a path through a snarling wood of astonishing violence. It makes sense to turn to fairy tales now.
The fairy tale is a form about children as much as it is a form for children, which makes it an important reference point for Tina Chang’s third book of poems, Hybrida — a book of kingdoms, forests, wolves, and witches. The volume often draws from fairy tales, implicitly if not explicitly, in its poems of protection, kinship, and social critique.