What happens when we dismantle the monumental status of a figure like Shakespeare in the canon? What other voices rise to describe the world?
Tag: Adaptation
How Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” Misses the Mark
When in December I heard an interview with Greta Gerwig on All Things ...
The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...
We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer ...
Caliban Blues
Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is one of hundreds of rewritings of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The adaptations began just over a decade after its first performance, in 1611, and for the past four ...
The Best and Worst Roald Dahl Adaptations
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG opened earlier this month, to mixed reviews and a box office neither big nor friendly. Now seems like a good time to take stock of the various ...
Austen’s Bodies
Walking back from seeing Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished epistolary novella Lady Susan, I passed a bus stop with a Fiat advertisement on it: ...
Roots 2.0
“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from.”1 Alex Haley penned these words in an attempt to account for the extraordinary ...
15 Great Book-to-TV Adaptations to Watch This Summer
It’s a good time to be a novelist if you dream of seeing your work on the small screen. So far this year, Showtime has picked up Ben Stiller’s adaptation of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love ...