The Illusion of Wholeness: Sophie Collins’s Who is Mary Sue?
When reading this book, expect your notions of speaker—and even what a book of poetry is—to be challenged.
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Posts Tagged: fan fiction
An Ultimate Illustrated Fantasy Guide of Gilmore Girls Mashups
HOW AWESOME WOULD THESE MASHUPS BE? Oh well. Maybe next year.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Fan fiction writers, rejoice: the future of TV is yours. Yoda-like lizard extracts water from sand without moving a muscle. Holy relics, bacteria, and the Ivy League reveal how to be a better liar. Why modern science rejected modernism. Hankering for a camel or zebra-horse? Try Missouri.
...moreMurder Deferred
Considering how prolific James Patterson and his team of writers are, it’s no surprise that he turned to “fan fiction” with a novel called The Murder of Stephen King. Unfortunately for those curious about the book, Patterson has cancelled its release, according Jackson Frons, writing at Electric Literature. Apparently, fans have been showing up uninvited at King’s house, which […]
...moreThe World’s Nicest Dad
Sara Benincasa‘s latest book, Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad, has made its way onto the bestseller lists on Amazon and Kindle since its electronic release on Friday. The 26-page book, a parody of Tim Kaine as “the world’s nicest dad,” was written by Benincasa “very early Friday morning because [she] couldn’t sleep,” with the cover illustrated […]
...moreFan Fiction Gone Wild
Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone. After the Guardian wrote about the suit, my own social media feeds filled up with […]
...moreFanfiction Can Be Literary Too
For Book Riot, Vanessa Willoughby explores the benefits of writing fan fiction, and how notable works are often imitations of timeless stories: Literature that is unforgettable incites a dialogue at the very least, and a conversation at its best. Novels can serve as responses to pre-existing literature. Some of the best pieces of literature are works […]
...moreWhat it Means to Remix
At Tor.com, Natalie Zutter looks at fandom’s remix culture through the lens of Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On novel, itself a remix of the Harry Potter series and countless Chosen One narratives.
...moreFan Fiction, Feedback Loops, and Literary Leakage
The New Inquiry has a smart analysis of fan fiction that examines its workings as a literary genre and as a form of reorienting, affecting, and queering a text: It announces a relationship to a source text that is infatuated, made dizzy, and vulnerable to betrayal. From this vulnerability, fanfiction seizes the objects of its affections and […]
...moreOur Words, Possessed by Fans
In the driest language possible, I would say that fan fiction successfully undermines the traditional American heteronormative dynamic in ways that can’t be undone. In wetter language, fan fiction sexualizes. It’s transgressive because it suggests the possibility of the erotic. It’s political, because it complicates power structures. And it’s personal, because it grants permission for […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The gamer story. Regardless of its iteration—D&D, Commodore 64, Nintendo, X Box, LARP—there is the hero, and there is the rest of the gang, subjugated as sidekicks and underlings. The gamer story has a long tradition of tropes and structures, arcs and character elements, at the center of which has always been the hero telling […]
...moreFanfiction in the Classroom
At The Millions, Elizabeth Minkel shares her take on fanfiction and its place within the classroom.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
For a weekly dose of fiction, checking in at the New Yorker is probably business as usual for most, and this week it’s definitely worth scoping out Amelia Gray’s story, “Labyrinth.” It’s a story infused with Greek mythology, dark humor, and a little small-town creepiness besides. The story is one among many forthcoming in Gray’s April 2015 […]
...moreFifty More Shades of Grey (And Counting)
Prospects for your serialized proto-fictional new generation adaptation of The Hunger Games are bright. As fan fiction solidifies its status as a literary genre in its own right, publishers are catching on: …what was once viewed as either uncreative, a legal morass of copyright issues, or both, is now seen as a potential savior for […]
...moreThe Stories at the Edges
There are novels like Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked and Mary Reilly that retell stories we know from new angles, and there are whole worlds of fanfiction letting new voices speak, as Anne Jamison’s recent book Fic demonstrates so well. But it’s the voices that speak from the edges of even those stories that interest […]
...morePride, Prejudice, Repeat
Jane Austen has been blowing up these days, with hundreds of fan-fictional responses to Pride and Prejudice gracing the dusty corners of bookstores and the Internet. Over at Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer wonders why we’re still so eager to return to Pemberley: Because Austen doesn’t overload us with sensory details about her characters, but merely depicts […]
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