e’ve talked about video games and their relation to narrative before. But how about fiction as video game?
Enter I-Play’s video game Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. According to the game description, you can “Find the hidden items on your list triggering character dialogue and progressing the story,” [...]

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is being adapted to the big screen, directed by Mark Romanke and with a screenplay by novelist Alex Garland. Stars include Keira Knightly as Ruth, Carey Mulligan as Kathy, and Andrew Garfield as Tommy. It’s hard to say much about the plot without giving away the [...]

What happens to a writer who can no longer read? NPR’s Morning Edition presents this fascinating (true) story of Canadian novelist Howard Engel, who forgot how to read—literally—after suffering a stroke. Engel managed to teach himself to read again and shared his story with neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.
When he looked at the front page [...]

Ever wonder what happens when literary professors make music? Glass Wave is what happens. Composed of four literary scholars—Thomas Harrison of UCLA and Robert Pogue Harrison, Dan Edelstein, and Christy Wampole of Stanford—plus drummer Colin Camarillo, Glass Wave has just released its first, self-titled album, with songs based on canonical Western literature.
Inside Higher [...]

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I [...]

Literary journal Electric Literature has put out a wonderfully weird animation based on one sentence from Jenny Offill’s short story “The Tunnel,” from Electric Literature No. 3. It reminds me of a mix between Alice and Wonderland and Monty Python, both whimsical and serious, but take a look for yourself:

This video is actually the [...]

We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the [...]

For some time I was one of few standing firmly in both camps—writer and gamer, fiction-fiend and pixel-popper. But the innovative nature of Next-Gen gaming, with its leaps in technology and massive install-base, means games have developed new depth–and the future of gaming promises to look a lot more like literature than flight simulators. This is, in many ways, the rise of a new novel. Like its lexicographic predecessor, the pixilated form revels in moral ambiguity, character motivations, conflicts between free will and fate.

Electric Literature presents this video adaptation of “The Cows”–a one-sentence story by Lydia Davis–created by artist Donna K. Bonus: did I mention it’s claymation?

Via.

We’ve talked about book trailers on FWR before (see below)–and it seems they’re gaining an even larger (and more interesting) presence…one aspiring to an adaptation genre of its own.
GalleyCat reports that the trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters will be shown in movie theatres around the country. That’s the book trailer, [...]