Today is the birthday of the venerable Lewis Carroll, creator of what is arguably the best-loved children’s tale of all time, Alice in Wonderland. He’s also the author of one of the trippiest, most psychedelic books of all time, which is, um, also Alice in Wonderland. To celebrate the occasion of his birth (he would be 180 years old today), we’ve collected the texts that we consider to be the trippiest books of all time, “trippy,” in this case, being defined as “resembling or inducing the hallucinatory effect produced by taking a psychedelic drug.” See, kids: why take drugs when you can just read these crazy books? They are much less likely to do you any permanent damage — though we can’t make any promises. Click through to read our list, and let us know if we’ve left off your favorite trippy tale in the comments!
If he were still alive, Alan Alexander Milne — you may know him as A. A. Milne — would turn 130 years old today. If you’re a fan of Milne’s books, you probably know that you can go and see the original teddy bear that inspired the character of Winnie-the-Pooh if you visit the New York Public Library — it’s on display there along with a selection of other similar stuffed toys that inspired Tigger, Eeyore, and Piglet. The fact that the books were based on Milne’s son’s toys is just one of a number of fascinating stories behind beloved children’s classics, and we’ve related a few more such tales after the jump. Let us know if you have any to add!
Ever wonder what your favorite book looked like when it was first published? While many classics — The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 — have retained their iconic, original covers over the years, others have changed with the times. As a follow up to last week’s roundup of famous magazines’ first covers, we’ve compiled 20 beautiful, surprising, or otherwise notable first covers of classic novels that we’d never seen before. See a surprisingly minimalist The Age of Innocence, a painful-looking The Sound and the Fury, the design that preceded A Clockwork Orange‘s famous ’70s cover, and many more, in chronological order after the jump. Read More »
Can you think of a more appropriate artist to illustrate Lewis Carroll’s bizarre children’s classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, than the master of surreal, Salvador Dalí? And yet, until we were tipped off by this post over on Brain Pickings, we had no idea that back in 1969 Dalí worked on an entire series of gouaches published by Maecenas Press-Random House that were inspired by the novel — one for each chapter of the book. Click through to fall down the rabbit hole with a selection of the strange, beautiful images, which were recently digitized by the William Bennett Gallery. Read More »
We all know truth is stranger than fiction, and some things (and people) are just too good to have been made up. We’ve already shown you quirky cartoon characters based on real people, and though we imagine there are many more life-to-literature adaptations than life-to-cartoon, we’ve decided to continue the trend and pick some of our favorite famous literary characters inspired by real-life people. For the most part, we’ve skipped the autobiographical inspirations, mostly because there are too many too count, though many writers would probably tell you there’s a little bit of themselves in every character they write, so in some ways that distinction is a losing battle. Click through to read out list of ten famous literary characters and their real-life counterparts, and let us know your own picks for your favorite truth-inspired heroes and heroines in the comments! Read More »
Sylvia Plath’s colorful canvasses from her art school days, William S. Burroughs’ splatter art from his later years, Lewis Carroll’s strange portrait photographs of little girls — these artistic endeavors are often overshadowed by their makers’ well-known literary bodies of work. Alternately, Vonnegut’s doodles seem to be so integrated into his prose, the two mediums are inseparable. In either direction, those toiling with typewriter keys and ink do sometimes pick up the camera, the paint brush or… the shot gun! Let’s take a sampling of the fruits of their doubly-apt efforts and peak at the visual media by some of our favorite authors.
The big news on the Internet today is that spoilers don’t ruin books — in fact, they actually increase the pleasure we get out of reading them. These scientific findings fly in the face of just about every other comment on every film and TV blog we’ve ever read, but we don’t actually find them terribly surprising. Some of Western culture’s best-loved a most-read books are, after all, ones whose endings are so widely known that most of us know them before we even pick up the book. After the jump, we’ve compiled — and revealed the outcomes of — ten classic works of literature that we read (and, in the case of plays, watch) even though they’ve already been “spoiled” for us.
After our recent roundup of 25 great parties on film, it occurred to us that movies aren’t the only medium to have depicted fantastic fêtes. So, to help you gear up for a celebratory July 4th weekend, we reached out to Flavorpill staff and readers alike to get their nominations for liteature’s best bash. With their help, we’ve come up with a list of ten great gatherings we would love to have attended. Keep the party going by adding your favorites in the comments.
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but um, we kind of do it all the time. In fact, half the fun of that anachronistic pleasure known as bookstore browsing is to indulge in that very vice — allowing certain covers or color schemes to catch your eye and draw you over to a tome you might never have picked up otherwise. That’s not to say that the covers, or even the descriptions on the back or inside flaps are necessarily good indicators of the book itself. Some cover designs achieve a perfect pairing of style and substance, some are to the point, and some are wildly off-base, inducing disgust and/or laughter when you actually read the book in question. Enter our new favorite tumblr: the delightfully witty Plausible-Seeming but Tonally Inappropriate Book Covers, in which a mystery artist (artists?) imagines possible bad book covers for some of our modern classics, complete with brilliant (and consistent, and upsetting) accolades from modern American hero Jonathan Franzen. Click through to see some of our favorites and let us know what you think in the comments.
Everyone had a favorite book as a kid – you know, that tattered old thing you carried from room to room and made you parents read out loud to you over and over again, the one that you quoted until you were, um, a little too old to be doing so. We know our lives were shaped in part by the literature we loved as children, so inspired by this recent list of books every child should read, we got to thinking about what your favorite kids book back then might say about you now that you’re all grown up. Click through for our predictions, and do your best to take it with the grain of salt we intend – don’t worry, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lovers, we’re not really accusing you of advocating slavery. Be sure to add to the fun and make up your own in the comments!
