Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Publishing

Cover Versions of Shakespeare's Play

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Author Jeanette Winterson, who loves cover versions of established stories, is writing a prose version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as part of Random House’s effort to rewrite all of the bard’s plays for his 400th anniversary.

“The Shakespeare purists,” she says, “miss the point about his exuberant ragbag of borrowings thrown into the alchemical furnace of his mind and lifted out transformed. He sums up the creative process, which is not concerned with originality of source but originality of re-making.”

I understand retelling stories, but while West Side Story may be based on Romeo and Juliet, it isn’t the same story. Play it cool, boy. And we all know you can retell essential stories again and again. People like cliches, but they will love one story over another because of the details around the essentials. When contemporary writers retell Shakespearean tales, it’s usually like telling a good joke wrong.

Authors

Vince Flynn dead at 47

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Minnesota author Vince Flynn, famous for his Mitch Rapp novels, died today of prostate cancer in a St. Paul hospital. He passed away surrounded by relatives and friends who prayed the Rosary.

Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, “Term Limits,” in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a local best-seller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal — and “Term Limits” became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.

The St. Paul-based author also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, “The Last Man,” was published last year.

R. I. P.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

The war over the Game

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The controversy over Andrew Klavan’s praise for Game of Thrones rumbles on, and I follow it with the fascination of a reality show fan, except for wishing both sides well.
A few days back I linked to Klavan’s column at PJ Media, “Eyes Wide Shut: Christians Against Art.” In the course of an argument – with which I generally agree – that Christians need to produce art that seriously addresses the real world, rather than some PG world we’d like to believe in, he mentions his own fondness for the HBO series, “Game of Thrones,” seeing it, apparently, as the sort of thing we ought to be trying to produce ourselves (though I’m sure he wouldn’t insist on including all the skin). In my own response, I expressed my own deep disillusionment with “Game” author George R. R. Martin’s books, a disillusionment which has prevented me from watching a single episode.
On Monday Dave Swindle, another PJ Media writer, responded to Klavan’s article in a similar vein:

You’ve known me since not long after I started editing full time. I was 25 and was only a defense hawk and fiscal conservative but still “socially liberal.” Since then, for a variety of reasons (particularly my return to belief in God), I’ve come further in my ideological shift. I’m genuinely embarrassed by some of the socially conservative positions I find myself now arguing. Never in a million years did I foresee myself as the type that would ever side with those cautioning against pornography’s downsides and the “shocking” content in art. You’ve talked in the past about how you disagree with our mutual friend Ben Shapiro about his Orthodox Judaism-inspired approach to culture and sex. I used to also — and I still disagree with Ben from time to time on issues and tactics (particularly on gay marriage. This is a theological difference deriving from an interpretation of scripture. He and I will just have to keep arguing about it). But on the fundamental issue, the social conservatism he explicates from his traditional reading of the Torah is correct: sex is sacred. It’s impossible to have “casual sex” with someone — every sexual act is transformative. I came to this understanding differently than him, though, through first-hand experience and painful mistakes.

Continue reading The war over the Game →

Authors

The Cultured Iain M. Banks

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Author Iain M. Banks died Sunday at 59. Neil Gaiman talks about his personal experience with the man, how funny and honest he was. Alan Jacobs talks about the ideas in his novels, leading with the fact that his “Culture” civilization is his secular imagining of heaven. Jacobs asks what Banks is trying to say in the conflict of his novels. Is it that we should expect a little suffering of the innocient for the good of civilization? And if so, just how much suffering would we allow to perfect our own culture?

Authors

Christian Writing, Calling

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Bret Lott has a new book on writing and calling being published by Crossway this month. Lott is a strong, literary author, whose novels Jewel, A Song I Knew by Heart, and many others are good examples of excellent Christian writing, like we have been discussing this week. Not that all Christian writing should aspire to his style, of course, but I tend to think that isn’t obvious yet.

Authors

Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare

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Here’s a brief documentary on how performing Shakespeare’s plays using his intended pronunciation works much differently than it does in modern pronunciation. Puns and rhymes appear, and actors say it changes their performances.

Authors, Writing

Creative Habits

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Mason Curry talks about the habits of artists in a three week series on the work routines of famous creatives. Frank Lloyd Wright started getting up at 4:00 a.m. and working until 7:00. Curry writes:

Indeed, many artists are early risers because they have little other choice; working early in the morning is a tried and true method of fitting creative work into busy schedules. The 19th-century novelist Frances Trollope is a good example. She did not begin writing until the age of 53, and then only because she desperately needed money to support her six children and ailing husband. In order to squeeze the necessary writing time out of the day while still acting as the primary caregiver to her family, Trollope sat down at her desk each day at 4 a.m. and completed her writing in time to serve breakfast. Her son Anthony Trollope later adopted a similar schedule, getting up at 5:30 a.m. and writing for two hours before going to his job at the post office. (Later in this series, I’ll be looking closely at artists who also held down full-time day jobs.)

Curry has just released a book on this topic: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Authors, Religion

Dallas Willard: Conscious of Real Life

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“For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:14).

Tom Nelson wrote on May 8 about the life and death of Dallas Willard. He quoted him, in reflection on this verse, “The difference is simply a matter of what we are conscious of. In fact, at ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.”

Not that this world isn’t real, as some say, but it is like an illusionist, distracting us with the inconsequential so that we miss the most important things. At death, we see through it all.

Authors, Poetry

Poet Christian Wiman's Next Step

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The editor of Poetry magazine is moving on. Tom Bartlett writes:

He’s not abandoning poetry—he’s not sure he could ever do that… This June he’s leaving his plum poetry gig to become a senior lecturer of religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale Divinity School, a job that was offered to him a couple of years after he lectured at the institute. “My life has been aiming at this,” he says. “It seems to me incredibly exciting but also a necessary thing for me to put my faith more on the line on a daily basis.”

I’ve been thinking about that myself lately.