Last modified on Tue 9 Mar 2021 03.59 EST
On 2 January this year, the day after
The Great Gatsby Undead was self-published on Amazon. Like F Scott Fitzgeraldâs hallowed novel, it is narrated by Nick Carraway, but in this version, according to the promotional blurb, âGatsby doesnât seem to eat anything, and has an aversion to silver, garlic, and the sunâ. Gatsby, you see, is a vampire.
More than 25m copies of
The Great Gatsby have been sold since it was first published in 1925, and the expiration of copyright, 95 years after it was released, opens the door to anything and everything fans might want to do with it. The start of the year also brought the release of
Last modified on Thu 28 Jan 2021 06.48 EST
After two decades of splashing around in the shallows of success, Monique Roffey was taking no chances with The Mermaid of Black Conch. The novel, which won the Costa book of the year award on Tuesday, is written in a Creole English and uses a patchwork of forms, from poetry to journal entries and an omniscient narrator, and “employs magical realism to the max”. Even its title was against it, she realised. “You’re either going to read a novel about a mermaid or you aren’t.”
Any one of these, she says, would scare away most publishers. So when one, the independent Peepal Tree Press, did bite, she launched a crowdfunder to enable her to hire her own publicist. It’s a mark of the esteem in which the 55-year-old author and university lecturer is held by those familiar with her work that 116 people chipped in, raising £4,500 within a month. Then, two weeks before the novel was due to be published, the UK went into lockdown, shutt
Features Tove Ditlevsen: Why it s time to discover Denmark s most famous literary outsider
‘The Billie Holliday of poetry’ was ignored by the male establishment, but her pioneering autofiction is finally being recognised around the world
“I talk about my book which has been returned from Gyldendal with a strange response, insinuating that I have been reading too much Freud,” Tove Ditlevsen writes of a publisher rejection. “I don’t even know who Freud is.”
Bleak, honest, wryly funny: the Danish author’s three-part memoir,
Childhood, Youth, Dependency charts Tove Ditlevsen’s emergence from a working-class corner of Copenhagen to becoming one of its best-known literary stars. By the time of her death at 58 in 1976, she had published 29 books, having published her first poetry collection while barely out of her teens. Ditlevsen’s work has been adapted for the stage, screen and even the pop charts; her long-running agony aunt column has recently been releas
Even though it may not boast any dreaming spires or belong to the Russell Group of leading universities, there was a time not so very long ago when Leicester University punched well above the weight of its provincial rivals.
Named Britain’s ‘University of the Year’ in 2008, with a heritage that encompassed great thinkers such as novelist Malcolm Bradbury, a former student, poet Philip Larkin, one of its old librarians, and Sir David Attenborough, who lived on the attractive campus as a child, it was home to nearly 23,000 students.
Exactly a decade ago, Leicester came 17th in the Guardian University Guide’s national league tables, and was also top university for ‘student satisfaction’ outside Oxbridge.
January 20, 2021
THE WASHINGTON POST – Last week, the copyright on F Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby expired, so anyone can now use its characters and particulars to fashion their own version, much as Jean Rhys did in
Wide Sargasso Sea, based on Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre. That’s why we just saw the release of
Nick, by Michael Farris Smith, in which the narrator of Fitzgerald’s classic novel, Nick Carraway, tells his own backstory.
But no one needs to wait for copyright expiration to use Fitzgerald’s plot, that time-honoured story in which a person on the fringe of high society becomes entangled in its enchantments and perfidies. In his second novel,