Alison Flood digs into the current teen fascination with dead narrators in the Guardian. Lurlene McDaniel may not think the trend so original: she’s been cranking out SickLit — oops that’s young-adult fiction featuring terminally ill protagonists — for over 20 years. In Horns, Joe Hill spins tragic young death in a different direction and throws in every pop-cultural reference to evil while he’s at it. He would know – his dad is Stephen King, who’s been busy of late helping Dave Eggers with a monster issue of McSweeney’s.
Speaking of untimely deaths: did Queen Elizabeth’s lover Robert Dudley’s wife accidentally fall down the stairs and break her neck? Or was she murdered in order to make way for Bessie to bed her lover legally? Chris Skidmore examines the circumstances around one of “the great unsolved deaths of the Tudor Age” in Death and the Virgin in The Times.
From death to the dispossessed: the TLS looks at Mavis Gallant’s early short stories, which are replete with this theme.
Moving on to self-denial — it’s big this time of year and continually pops up literature. How much do you know about holding back and enduring?
And once again, because it’s Friday and you probably have a little literary viewing on your mind, check out various clips of British director Jonathan Miller’s fab 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland. There’s plenty to choose from with loads of big names hidden in the richness – Peter Sellers, Sirs John Guilgud and Michael Redgrave, and a young Eric Idle, among others. Trippy black and white stuff befitting a February day. Who needs Tim Burton or the multiplex?
