Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: If you thought that might be the punch line for a joke about what could get guys to read chick lit, you’re half right. It’s also a new well, kind of novel, in bookstores today, by “Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.”
Austen was unavailable for an interview, but Grahame-Smith, 33, is promoting the collaboration. A comedy writer with five books to his name, he’s writer/executive producer of a pilot filming for MTV, Hard Times.
Grahame-Smith retained Austen’s plot and characters but added a 55-year zombie infestation of the English countryside. The husband-hunting Bennet sisters still sally out to tea parties and balls, but they go armed with muskets, swords and their training as ninja zombie killers.
It’s all rendered in Regency-style prose, complete with the wit that’s an Austen hallmark. When one of Elizabeth Bennet’s friends announces her marriage to an unsuitable suitor, she confides that she has been bitten by a zombie: “I don’t have long, Elizabeth. All I ask is that my final months be happy ones, and that I be permitted a husband who will see to my proper Christian beheading and burial.”
Grahame-Smith chatted by phone from Los Angeles.
Collette Bancroft: What’s the origin of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
Seth Grahame-Smith: My editor, Jason Rekulak, and I had done five books together. He always had this obsession. He wanted to add some ridiculous subplot to a classic book.
One day he called me and said, “All I have is this title, but I can’t get it out of my head: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
I said, “I think that’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.”
CB: People thought this might be a short, one-joke item. Why rewrite the entire novel?
SGS: Jane Austen did all the hard work. She gave her characters such life and such unpredictable arcs, she let the plot unfold so brilliantly. All I had to do was paint over it.
Take Elizabeth. Instead of the sharp-witted, independent young woman, she’s a sharp-daggered, independent young woman. She just happens to be a talented slayer of the undead.
CB: Did your publisher think it was a brilliant idea?
SGS: We had to work hard to sell it as a concept. Finally they said, “Okay, but you’ll have to do it quickly, and we’re not going to spend a lot of money on it.”
Then some industrious blogger found it, and suddenly it propagated throughout the blogosphere.
CB: Despite its crazy concept, you took the writing of the book very seriously. Why?
SGS: I wanted people who would never read Austen to pick this up. I also didn’t want to write a book that wouldn’t be palatable to her fans. I was afraid it might offend the Janeites. I call it the “How dare you, Sir? syndrome.” But so many Janeites have loved it. They have a great sense of humor.
CB: Do you think we’ll see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Film?
SGS: Hey, it’s no crazier than half the movies that get made.
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
RSS