This week: dramatic interpretations of literary hatemail, Twitter film adaptations, fun facts about the reading habits in Guantanamo Bay, and more after the jump. Read more »

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek, the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely. Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home, Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel, a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories, genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the old adage “there are no new stories.”

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On June 4, two of Inhae Lee’s teeth (or as she puts it, “teef”) jumped into a bathtub and scrubbed themselves clean with toothpaste. On August 4, they went for a dip in the pool. These are a few of the recent entries on My Milk Toof, a blog that details, through photo essays, the not-so-mundane adventures of the creator’s liberated baby teeth, lovingly named ickle and Lardee.

Each photo is a treat to behold, having been painstakingly assembled with a mix of both miniaturized props that complement the teeth’s small size as well as actual-sized objects. And though visually stunning, the narratives themselves are surprisingly straightforward. A recent post called “Sweet Treats” consisted of nearly 35 photos of the two “teef” eating ice cream, and a large majority of those photos were merely captioned with the words, “slurp slurp slurp.”

Faulkner, it ain’t.

But readers loved it. “Sweet Treats” has received over 200 comments and counting, and while there are no statistics available about the readership of the site itself, the 13,500+ fans on My Milk Toof’s Facebook page indicate this is more than just a casual project. Read more »

Peggy's Job + Joan's Wardrobe = Mad Men Daydream Happiness

I am the daughter of an Ad Man.  Product loyalty to company clients dictated the brands of my youth (I still hesitate to buy Crest Toothpaste even if it’s on sale because it was Colgate’s biggest competitor back when it was my father’s client).  While I recognize that we are two steps away from a world where our dreams are interrupted by commercial breaks, I have also developed a bit of taste for the innovative lengths companies have taken to make their brands known and remembered.  Though we’re likely about a century and a human rights movement shy of having our subconscious being the latest vehicle for advertising, we’ve also come quite a long way from our simple magazine and television ads.  If you do recall (and I am talking to you, David Simon), these mediums of entertainment were created solely to keep you seated between commercial breaks.

I’ve heard great things about The Wire.  In fact, I’ve only heard great things about The Wire. And while I’ve heard nothing but great things, I don’t watch it because it requires me to pay beyond basic cable.  That’s right.  I’m not paying extra for HBO.  Don’t get me wrong, HBO is fantastic – that sense of freedom both the creators and the viewers feel without the constraints of commercials? My God.  Curse! Have sex! Throw a friend into a wood chipper! You can do it and you can do it graphically because there are no sponsors breathing down your neck about how their product will look popping up right after you’ve viewed a candid conversation about teabagging.  Read more »

Sure it’s Thursday, but I’m so gung-ho about kicking off Free Book Friday that I just can’t help starting a day early. In our new feature, you have the chance each week to snag some of the best titles from the industry publishing industry. For free!

This week, we are giving away a copy of Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer. Originally published by Random House in 1968, Nog is the novel that inspired Thomas Pynchon to declare that “the Novel of Bullshit is dead.” Over the years, Nog has become a universally revered cult novel and symbol of the countercultural movement. Time Out New York says that Nog‘s “combo of Samuel Beckett syntax and hippie-era freakiness mapped out new literary territory for generations to come. In Wurlitzer’s signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift through the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere. This edition of Nog features a new introduction from noted critic and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis).”

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Two Dollar Radio. Two Dollar Radio is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. They aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book individually and collectively providing a sonic progression that they believe to be too loud to ignore.

You can read the first chapter of Nog for free on Two Dollar Radio’s website.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment with your e-mail address in the space below, or send an email directly to contact@litdrift.com. We also recommend doing any or all of the following: Read more »

Because a lot can happen in one week and we think it’s worthy to tell you about it, we’re starting a new feature called Midweek Pick-Me-Up. Every Wednesday we sum up the week’s lit & culture news and then help to push you through the rest of the week with a pick-me-up, which is a folksy way of saying we show you a funny video, story, or webcomic.

The demise of Reading Rainbow, more discussion about digital readers (as if you haven’t had enough already), and some freaky Twilight-inspired cover art for a classic novel, and more after the jump.

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Well, Josh Neufeld has one answer.

To commemorate the recent four-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Neufeld released A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a graphic novel that details one of the world’s worst disasters through the stories of seven real survivors.  Neufeld himself volunteered with the Red Cross in the Gulf Coast after the storm and chronicled his experiences on a blog.  A few years ago, a commenter on the blog wrote: “Do a comic. Please.” Readers were already familiar with Neufeld’s work on Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” so they knew that his storytelling comics had the power to convey the intensity of the disaster.

Neufeld began by writing a serialized webcomic that also included links to archival footage and other materials documenting what actually happened in the Gulf. Through multiple installments of the comic, he followed the lives of real people dealing with the aftermath of the storm. Now the comic has just been released as a book with some new additions. Read more »

A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man: Read more »