Like all literary nerds, we’re fascinated by the marginalia of our favorite authors, and recently we’ve been totally addicted to examining their handwritten manuscripts and journal entries. Thanks to the our new favorite Tumblr, Fuck yeah, manuscripts!, there are many examples at hand, but after spending a significant time sifting through, we wondered if we were really learning anything. In an attempt to be pop-psychologists, we checked out a 5-minute online handwriting analysis test (meant, obviously, for hiring managers), to see if we could dig up anything on our favorite writers. We found the results to be something like a horoscope — a little bit right for everybody, but probably kind of random. Click through to check out the handwriting of ten famous writers, and see what it might say about them.
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Sometimes you love a book — or an author’s body of works — so much that you need an outlet that allows you to express that love. Sure, book club might help a little, but if you’re a truly die-hard fan, you might find that you need a little more tradition (or maybe full-on period costumes) to really inspire you. After all, nothing makes literature come to life like actually incorporating it into the modern-day world, whether by holding nonstop readings, visiting grave sites, or carrying around special tokens of appreciation and winking at other insiders. So if you’ve wondering how best to salute your favorite authors and novels, click through to read up on a few literary traditions ripe for the joining, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
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Earlier this week, we discovered a set of lovely golden Lord of the Rings-inspired nails over at io9, and we have to admit that we’ve been daydreaming about our perfect literary dream manicures ever since. After all, we’ve already gushed over (and failed at trying to replicate) these awesome Twin Peaks nails, so it’s only fair we give a little love to the literary side of fingernail-based super-fandom. Because if you’re serious about being a literary nerd, why not extend your love of books to the very tools that let you turn the pages and proclaim your great taste in reading material to the world all at once? Click through to get inspired by a few of our favorite works of literary nail art, and let us know which books you’re dying to have at your fingertips in the comments!
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Jane Austen is one of English literature’s most popular classic authors, among both scholars and general readers. And yet, nearly 200 years after her death, we’re still struggling to put a face to her name. The only two authenticated Austen portraits are this drawing, by her sister Cassandra, and a painting based on that image from 1870, over 50 years after the writer’s death in 1817. So it’s big news indeed that Austen biographer Dr. Paula Byrne may have stumbled upon another portrait of her subject.
As the Guardian reports, Byrne’s husband bought the graphite drawing — thought to be an “imaginary portrait,” with the words “Miss Jane Austin” scrawled on the back — at auction. But the picture dates to 1815, decades before Austen achieved posthumous fame, raising the question of why anyone would have made an imaginary drawing an unknown author. Two of the world’s top three Austen scholars believe the portrait is real, and Byrne hopes that the new image will change the way the world sees the writer, presenting “a woman very confident in her own skin, very happy to be presented as a professional woman writer and a novelist, which does fly in the face of the cutesy, heritage spinster view.” Read more about the portrait and see a larger version of it at the Guardian.
This past week, Jack Kerouac’s first-ever novel, The Sea is My Brother, was finally published 40 years after his death. The novel, long thought to be lost by experts, was unearthed in Kerouac’s personal archive by his brother-in-law. We are constantly inspired by the way that our over-processed world still hangs on to its secrets, and even more by the way that bits of history can hide in plain sight, so to celebrate this newest development in the literary canon, we decided to take a look at Kerouac’s newest/oldest book and other lost novels that were eventually found again. Click through to see our list of lost and found novels, and if you’ve ever had a literary relative, get ready to go hunting in your attics for your own treasure chests. Read More »
Nearly two centuries after her death, it’s still unclear what killed Jane Austen. Biographers have attributed Austen’s demise to everything from Addison’s disease to bovine tuberculosis to Hodgkin’s disease, any of which could have caused the year-and-a-half-long illness she endured before dying at 41 in 1817. But now, a crime novelist is floating a much more intriguing theory — that Austen died of arsenic poisoning. The Guardian reports that Lindsay Ashford stumbled upon a collection the author’s letters while at work on a book and noticed that the symptoms Austen described in her final months matched with her understanding of arsenic’s effects. It turns out that a strand of the author’s tested positive for the substance.
Now, even if Austen’s death was arsenic-related, that doesn’t mean she was murdered; a doctor might well have prescribed a medicine containing the element, which was widely used at the time. But Ashford — who has written a new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, based on her findings — doesn’t think homicide is out of the question. “Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder,” she told the paper. “In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn’t until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic.” Read more about Ashford’s investigation and Austen’s mysterious death at The Guardian.
It’s a well-known fact that authors, for all their brilliance, can be less than visionary when it comes to coming up with titles. We understand — so much goes into the perfect title, both from an artistic and a commercial point of view, and when you’re so close to the work at hand, we can imagine how it could be a little challenging to see the issue from all angles. But even if a writer is particularly talented at title-penning, the names of books can go through as many permutations as the text itself before they see the light of day. Plus, for good or ill, writers have husbands, wives, publishers and others to weigh in, causing even more changes. Lovers of book trivia, read on: after the jump you’ll find our list of what some classic works were almost called. Check it out and let us know whether you think the changes were for the better or the worse in the comments. Read More »
Writers get a bad rap in the looks department: if you spend your time holed up and scribbling away, you must be a scrawny, pasty artist type, mustn’t you? Not so! There are a plethora of attractive and well-formed writers, both in history and today, that completely demolish such stereotypes, and whose likenesses we’ve collected here. Now don’t get us wrong — of course we believe that the stuff in their heads is much more important that the shape of their heads (or the shape of their bodies, for that matter) but that doesn’t mean we can’t applaud them for excelling in multiple areas. Plus, it’s well past time to make literature sexy again, and if writers can replace actors as pinups in our culture of ogling, we’ll be happy campers. We’ve tried to pick some contemporary authors as well as some more classic choices, and an equal number of men and women, just to be fair to everyone. Click through to see the authors we think have the best literary figures in history, and make sure to tell us your own picks in the comments.
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Under the influence of characters, setting, and plot, a number of artists have recently taken it upon themselves to recreate book covers of some of the most beloved literature, often with fantastic results. Whether it be through illustration or painting, collage or embroidery, reimagined cover art isn’t limited to the cardboard backings of books, but takes on a life of its own that ranges from extravagant and crafty, with kaleidoscopic-colored thread twirling on the page, to simple but powerful, with bold graphic designs and eerie color pallets. And while each piece is aesthetically different, these book covers have one thing in common — they all pay homage to the authors and works we hold so dear. See 20 of our favorite works inspired by the likes of J.D Salinger, The Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl after the jump.
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We’ve seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even an XXX version of the novel. Hell, Jane Austen even has her own fight club. So it’s not entirely surprising to see Forbes report that she’s now been transformed into a video game heroine. Designed by an app developer called Feel Every Yummy, Word Fighter pits friends or strangers on mobile devices against one another in a race to spell words quickly, using a Boggle-style board. The developers characterize their Jane as “a bad-ass version of Princess Peach… At a glance, she appears to be a very prim and proper lady — as you can see in her portrait — but when it’s time to throw down, she’s ready to destroy you.” Other familiar-sounding characters include J.D., Agatha, and Edgar. Watch a video of Word Fighter in action after the jump.
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