Columns

Jane Austen reviews ’Fifty Shades of Grey’ by E.L. James

February 19th, 2015

Bubble image via Ruffles and Restraints As well as writing six novels on the subject of love and marriage, Jane Austen kept up regular correspondence with her family, including her niece, Fanny Knight, who once asked her for advice on whether she should marry for love.

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Stop Laughing at Yourself: A Loud Legacy of Exclamations

February 19th, 2015

To repeat a quote that basically everyone on earth has heard already, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that using an exclamation point “is like laughing at your own joke.” We’ve all known that person who suffers from inappropriate exclamation overuse. They sprinkle in an extra punctuation mark at the end of every paragraph, even with an occasional audacious smiley face dotting the tails of two in a row.

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Sneaking Around in YA: 6 Kickass Female Spies

February 18th, 2015

Everybody loves a strong female lead, and thankfully there's quite a few clever, sneaky girls lurking around the Young Adult shelves. Whether they're fighting crime in the halls of the local high school, fending off the the bad guys in Cold-war Russia, or shaking things up in a steampunk setting, these girls know how to kick butt and take some names. Get acquainted with some kickass female spies in these six Young Adult novels. 

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The Two Hours' Traffic of Our Stage: 9 Films You May Not Know are Shakespeare Adaptations

February 17th, 2015

Shakespeare adaptations have been a significant fixture in cinema since its beginning, the first coming into being as early as 1899 with King John. Types of adaptations range from straight forward versions, complete with Shakespeare’s lines and settings, to modern retellings in new, unexpected locations, to mixtures of the two, like Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996).

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32 Valentines: Showing Love For Books And Writers

February 16th, 2015

All photos by Peter Derk In third grade, there was this country kid in my class, Bryan. He was one of these kids in school who definitely lived on a farm. He wore tight black jeans and a black cowboy hat. On Valentine's day, he gave this girl Stephanie roses. I thought this was about the ballsiest thing I'd ever seen.

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The Third Hobbit Movie Made Me Sad and Hollywood's New Addiction For Splitting Adaptations Sucks

February 16th, 2015

Those first two Hobbit movies. Man, they were long. Longer than they needed to be. It's easy to forget they're about a hobbit. If you didn't know anything about J.R.R. Tolkien's novel, then I have to imagine the title is confusing—you'd think The Hobbit is about the wacky adventures of a handful of dwarves, and also sometimes Bilbo Baggins shows up to say something pithy. 

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Book vs. Film: Fifty Shades of Grey

February 13th, 2015

It seems insulting to describe Fifty Shades of Grey simply as a book.  It’s one of the most successful intellectual properties of our time, generating a massive revenue stream and commanding extraordinary brand name recognition globally. It was a gamechanger for publishing, eReaders and sex toy manufacturers.

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Seven Grammar Tools to Love

February 13th, 2015

Like many rule sets, grammar rules seem like they are forced upon us by some faceless, evil source driven to destroy our everyday communication. But you can look at it another way. To me, grammar rules are more like grammar tools—common methods understood by many that can be used to create something extraordinary.

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Some Literary Dos and Don'ts for a Lonely Valentine's Day

February 12th, 2015

Once again, it's time. It's time to be inundated by a torrent of both overwrought sentimentality and reactionary snark. A time for feeling like your special outing might not be so special after all, as you stand in line with thirty-two other couples and grumble about how long your magical evening is taking. A time for rage-reading holiday-themed web content (ahem). A time for looking at everything, ever so briefly, through the rosy-colored lens of love or the black-lidded shades of lonerdom. It's time for Valentine's Day.

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Culling the Poetry Classics: Edna St. Vincent Millay

February 12th, 2015

Happy Valentine's Day! I've got quite the treat for all you hopeless romantics out there. Hopefully you weren't too discouraged by the rough start this column got off to last month with the über-New Englander Robert Frost. I've got another American for you—and another New Englander, actually—but a woman this time, one who was obsessed with love in all its many forms and facets. Does she survive the culling, though?

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