Yeah, that one. There was one more left in the series. And it was, we humbly think, the best of the bunch, so we aptly saved it for last: book blogger extraordinaire Maud Newton summarizes the classic novel Crime and Punishment in 60 seconds.

Because we thought the challenge wasn’t hard enough, we asked filmmaker Adam to summarize the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one minute.

John Irving’s The World According to Garp summarized in 60 seconds. Watch it!

Last month I was invited to participate in Piethos, a competitive and totally sweet (literally) reading hosted by Brooklyn’s own Slice Magazine. The terms of the game:

Five representatives of various New York City area literary establishments (blogs, publications, online mags, bookstores) are given a writing prompt 48 hours before the event and have to write something to be read out loud and please a crowd. After anonymous audience votes are cast (and the host C.A.B. Fredricks admits that it’s only somewhat of a popularity contest for whoever can bring the most of their friends to the reading), the winner gets a freshly-baked pie made by Brooklyn’s own (I’ll stop saying that soon) Fat and Flour.

The prompt I received via email a day and a half before the event:

“Write a story based around a movie you have never seen.”

Mind you, anyone who knows me knows that I hate movies. Not only that but I am a nonfiction writer (mostly) and haven’t taken a real stab at short fiction since…probably…high school (that was almost a decade ago). But it turned out to be a wonderful literary challenge and I was actually pleased with the outcome.

While Lauren Spohrer very much deservedly so got the pie (she’s a repeat winner and wrote on a prompt about an older building falling in love with a younger building), I still took this business very seriously and had way more fun doing it than I could have anticipate. (Her piece was totally brilliant; it mixed architectural jargon with highfalutin romance in a way that was more sexually euphemistic than anything I’ve ever heard.)

The piece I wrote (in one sitting of about three hours!) weaves a story about a middle-aged Italian man living in Bay Ridge Brooklyn with the plots of a handful of movies I’ve never seen (or what I guess the plots of those films to be!). Whoever guesses the films included below wins an e-cookie.  Enjoy!

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The latest in our “classic novels in 60 seconds” series. Enjoy!

Just in time for Valentine’s Day.

[Earlier: The Great Gatsby retold in 60 seconds]

Remember this from a few months back?

For the last few months, we’ve been working hard with the good folks over at Anthology Media to put together a spiffy new web video series for you. The concept is pretty simple: we get writers, musicians, actors, and other creative types to summarize their favorite novels. In 60 seconds or less. With no time to prepare.

One of most the interesting aspects we found about this project was how it reflected the sorts of things people take away from fiction. We had each participant summarize a couple of stories, and everyone seemed to have a theme. Carolina, who you’ll see in a few weeks, managed to end each of her 60-second summaries with the concept of love. Morgan somehow related everything back to prostitutes and redemption. Other themes? Dinosaurs and aliens. This was all the more interesting when the stories in question contained neither dinosaurs nor aliens.

We’re kicking off the project with Matt Mazur, a NYC-based folk and comedy musician. He composed this little diddly about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby off the top of his head. Enjoy and, if you like it, please share:

And by “top-secret project,” I mean “project about which I continually drop annoyingly vague hints.” Stay tuned.