“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten.” Thus begins The Meowmorphosis—a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Kafka’s classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and discovers that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? And how can Gregor be so selfish as to devote all his attention to a scrap of ribbon? As his new feline identity threatens to eat away at his personality, Gregor desperately tries to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal by accomplishing the one thing he never could as a man: He must flee his parents’ house.
New York Times bestseller An uproarious tale of romance, heartbreak, and tentacled mayhem inspired by the classic Jane Austen novel—from the publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters expands the original text of the beloved Jane Austen novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, and other biological monstrosities. As our story opens, the Dashwood sisters are evicted from their childhood home and sent to live on a mysterious island full of savage creatures and dark secrets. While sensible Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars, her romantic sister Marianne is courted by both the handsome Willoughby and the hideous man-monster Colonel Brandon. Can the Dashwood sisters triumph over meddlesome matriarchs and unscrupulous rogues to find true love? Or will they fall prey to the tentacles that are forever snapping at their heels? This masterful portrait of Regency England blends Jane Austen’s biting social commentary with ultraviolent depictions of sea monsters biting. It’s survival of the fittest—and only the swiftest swimmers will find true love!
Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals—pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, Bestiarium Judaicum asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories? Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier examinations (On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions and The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity) of how such writers drew upon representations of Jewish corporeality in order to work through their particular situations in Gentile modernity. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, Bestiarium Judaicum brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species "Jew" were identified.
Complete with romance, action, comedy, and an army of shambling corpses, this prequel to the hit mash-up novel will have Jane Austen rolling in her grave—or crawling out of it! Four years before the events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Bennet sisters are enjoying a peaceful life in the English countryside, reading, gardening, and daydreaming about future husbands—until a funeral at the local parish goes strangely and horribly awry. Suddenly, corpses are springing from the soft earth—and only one family can stop them. As the bodies pile up, Elizabeth Bennet grows from a naive young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. Along the way, two men vie for her affections: Master Hawksworth is the powerful warrior who trains her to kill, while thoughtful Dr. Keckilpenny seeks to conquer the walking dead using science instead of strength. Will either man win the prize of Elizabeth’s heart? Or will their hearts be feasted upon by hordes of marauding zombies?
This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past’s invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers – including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful – producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of ‘canonical’ neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at – the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
Project Management for Book Publishers provides readers with a solid understanding of efficient processes and workflows for content creation, product development, and the marketing and distribution of both physical and digital products. Digital has brought more data, more training, and more accountability to the publishing process. But it has also shone light on how systems designed initially around print-first publications are ill-equipped to support an industry of now would-be digital media companies. This book addresses some of the major challenges for publishing houses facing this reality, including how to create a digital-aware workflow, implementing quality assurance procedures, and using different management systems to develop an efficient workflow. Beginning by explaining project and product management practices used throughout technology and media companies, it then delves into when and how these principles can be applied to the publishing workflow. Topics covered include Waterfall and Agile Project Management, Scrum methodology, Kanban framework, ebook and audio formats, metadata, quality assurance, crowdfunding, in-app monetization, ONIX, and accessibility. Readers will consider not just how to contend with online platforms that allow authors to publish with the click of a button, and audiences accustomed to accessing content across multiple platforms and formats, but also challenges arising from factors such as the data-driven acquisitions model in libraries, the downward spiral of sales in college bookstores, the call for accessibility, and the need for fluid content systems that can work with different publishing databases and software. Written for publishing professionals at all levels, this book will also help advanced students of Publishing and Book Studies navigate best practices for project management in the modern publishing landscape.
How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.
The year's best, and darkest, tales of terror, showcasing the most outstanding new short stories by both contemporary masters of the macabre and exciting newcomers. As ever, this acclaimed anthology also offers a comprehensive overview of the year in horror, a necrology of recently deceased luminaries, and a list of indispensable addresses horror fans and writers. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror remains the world's leading annual anthology dedicated solely to presenting the best in contemporary horror fiction.
This book focuses on how everyday media such as Facebook, iTunes and Google can be understood in new ways for the 21st century through ideas of convergence. Key chapters explore the development of the internet, the rise of social media and the new opportunities for audiences to create, collaborate upon and share their own media.
Leo Tolstoy meets robots in this “creepy, thrilling, and highly enjoyable” sci-fi mashup of the classic Russian novel Anna Karenina (Library Journal). “ . . . lives up to its promise to make Tolstoy ‘awesomer.’”—The Onion AV Club It’s been called the greatest novel ever written. Now, Tolstoy’s timeless saga of love and betrayal is transported to an awesomer version of 19th-century Russia. It is a world humming with high-powered groznium engines: where debutantes dance the 3D waltz in midair, mechanical wolves charge into battle alongside brave young soldiers, and robots—miraculous, beloved robots!—are the faithful companions of everyone who’s anyone. Restless to forge her own destiny in this fantastic modern life, the bold noblewoman Anna and her enigmatic Android Karenina abandon a loveless marriage to seize passion with the daring, handsome Count Vronsky. But when their scandalous affair gets mixed up with dangerous futuristic villainy, the ensuing chaos threatens to rip apart their lives, their families, and—just maybe—all of planet Earth.
