Pride and Prejudice at 200

Two hundred years after Jane Austen penned Pride and Prejudice, the regency comedy of manners has never had a larger following or longer legs.

If you weren’t sure about this before, you can be now. Yesterday marked the 200th anniversary of the book’s publication date and the international outpouring for Austen’s most famous creation was breathtaking.

If you’re an Austen fan, you can still jump

A Birthday for Brontë

Anne Brontë, the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters, was born in Yorkshire, England, on this day in 1820. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

She was meek and more religious-minded than Charlotte or Emily and little is known about her life compared to the lives of her sisters. As a child, she was closest to Emily, the youngest of her older siblings. Together they played with toys, made up

American Classics to be Replaced With How-To Manuals

Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced in US classrooms by 2014, according to The London Telegraph. And what will replace them? Non-fiction texts aimed at getting students ready for the workplace. From The Telegraph:

A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an

Before Vampires Sparkled

Abraham “Bram” Stoker, the Irish writer who created Dracula in 1897, was born 165 years ago today. Though we try to keep our eyes on birthdays, this one was particularly difficult to miss as it’s been commemorated by Google doodle.

Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 and though he wrote a dozen novels and armloads of short stories, it is his fifth novel, Dracula, for which he is most remembered.

Fiction: The Little House Books: The Library of America Collection by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Caroline Fraser

In 2012, books are easy and everywhere. They are downloadable and sometimes disposable. And even while the world goes mad and the book world rocks on its heels, there has never been a time where the entire planet has been more literate. And I can’t imagine there’s ever been a time when we talk about books quite this much.

Into this climate of literature that is easily and inexpensively available

Fiction: The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac

First, let it be understood that Jack Kerouac’s first but-until-now-unpublished novel, The Sea Is My Brother was never actually lost. And, having never been lost, it can not now be found. Kerouac himself never tried to get the novel published. In fact, by all accounts, he didn’t really think much at all of the work. In Kerouac by Ann Charters, she quotes the author as saying that the book was “

Fiction: Jane Austen Made Me Do It: Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart edited by Laurel Ann Natt

If we are at the zenith of Jane Austen-inspired hysteria, then Jane Austen Made Me Do It (Ballantine) is its nadir. Not the mania or madness of the Austen-inspired zombie stories popular late in the last decade or even the gentle Austen-solved mystery stories more recently come to the fore. Jane Austen Made Me Do It is Austen as applied right now.The publication of Jane Austen Made Me Do It is