book remakes?

i guess there are the 8,000,000,000 reinterpretations of folk tales & fables etc., but i'm wondering about something more contemporary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

although it would be hard to get around copyright shit.

xp

hmmmm......this is the only short story one i can recall of, off the top of my head. (And it's not very good.)

RICK MOODY: I don't know exactly, it might be that . . . . And it might be that I was in writing workshops for years and years and years and so I just got used to getting the occasional assignment or something. But it just is sort of . . . I don't know why it operates as kind of a restriction and something to work against and that just makes me feel that much more energized. Both the "Double Zero" in "Demonology" and the fairy tale story, "Pan's Fair Throng" were written under sort of the rigors of particular assignment requirement.

BILL GOLDSTEIN: And what were those . . . I mean for those stories?

RICK MOODY: "Double Zero" . . . Dave Eggers at McSweeny's was sort of trying to assemble a whole bunch of stories that were quote "cover version" unquote in the kind of rock and roll sense of great short stories past. And you know, he said do you want to do this and I was sort of like absolutely, but you have to pick the story because I want . . . if he said do a John Cheever's story or "A&P" by John Updike I was going to say no, I don't want to do that. And he picked a story that I didn't even know well which is "The Egg" by Sherwood Anderson . . . I knew "Winesberg, Ohio" really well, but this is one of the stories that wasn't in "Winesberg, Ohio" . . . so because it was such a left field idea and because Anderson's a writer that almost nobody would say has very much influence over what I do, I just jumped all over it because I thought it really would come from a strange place. And indeed, it's a story that's unlike most of the others in the book.

Suzan Lori Parks redid As I Lay Dying, kinda sorta and called it Getting Mother's Body.

then there's this sort of crap

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4137WX3P24L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Garcia Marquez's Melancholy Whores was a sort of remake of/response to Kawabata's Sleeping Beauties.

Lot of "from the viewpoint of" retellings published over the last few decades. I quite like John Gardener's Grendel, and that's one of those. Can't think of any others I'd recommend, though. And while Kathy Acker named a few books as though they might be cover versions, they really weren't. Tell you the truth, I can't really think of any. It's an interesting idea...

I know Updike keeps using bits from 'The Scarlet Letter' throughout many of his books. Isn't Jane Smiley's 'A Thousand Acres' a version of 'King Lear' (a play not a book, but you know...).

"The Wind Done Gone"

an interesting question!

there was that lolita one too.

There's Foe by Coetzee, and then those 'homages', like Last Orders by Graham Swift and On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which take As I Lay Dying and Howard's End as scaffolding. Dunno. Still not quite what this is after I think. Also, googling reveals modern retellings of exactly the books you might expect - Pride & p, Wuthering H, J Eyre - same perspective (ie not Ulysses from Molly pov, Gulliver's Travels from G's wife pov, etc), modern settings.
Sorry for abbrevs, in a rush. Interesting question agreed.

"The Wind Done Gone"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

-- cutty, Monday, August 11, 2008 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

my post was a remake

Also "Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead".

Also things like the comic book version of "City of Glass" or the redoing of "Exercises in Style" as a comic.

Translations...

Also things like the comic book version of "City of Glass" or the redoing of "Exercises in Style" as a comic.

Or Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page Gravity's Rainbow.

oh that book is so amazing!

it's online also btw

There was that Stephen Fry book that was a remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. He claimed not to have realized this until he was almost finished. My sister read it, said it sucked.

it would be kinda cool to do a dirty projectors thing and re-write a book that you love from memory.

For some reason, I think this is a more appealing idea when applied to short stories than to novels. Covering songs, as opposed to entire albums.

yeah but keep in mind--short stories are not songs. you can't really "cover" them. you can allude to other things and that's cool and all. . .i think this an interesting theory but hardly ever successful. it's hard to execute well, i would imagine. i think the most interesting pieces are those that take inspiration/characters from one work, like Hamlet, and put two minor characters into a play of your own--i.e. Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead. but then, ha, you also get Ahab's Wife.

allude to other things=allude to other fiction, poetry, plays in your own fiction is what i meant

Malcolm Knox 9Australian writer) wrote Summerland' as a modern re-telling of Ford's 'The Good Soldier'

just today on the train i was thinking about doing a page-by-page re-write of the da vinci code

yeah but keep in mind--short stories are not songs

ok thanks i will remember that

you can't really "cover" them

it would be entirely possible for an author to rewrite someone else's story in their own style. i guess it isn't done because it wouldn't be that interesting for the author or for the reader.

The Warriors (novel which preceded the film) is based on the Anabasis by Xenophon.

There's no particular reason why you couldn't think of a short story as having a sort of platonic ideal version, the way we think of songs.

I'm not sure I think of songs in that way at all!

faulkner's "ideal" version of the sound and the fury was going to feature mutli colored texts for all of the different voices--don't think i'd be into that so much.

I don't know that covering short stories would be so uninteresting, either for authors or for readers. More so for some, of course, but a collection of high-school lit classics covered by a good cross-section of interested contemporary writers could at least make for entertaining light reading. At best, probably more goofily amusing than groundbreaking, but there's nothing wrong with that. The biggest hurdle might be the assumption that there's an interested audience familiar with an exploitable canon, but if you could come up with a good clutch of stories and a set of sympathetic "translators", the basic concept allows a LOT of room for individual variation/exploration.

why would someone want to read a "rehashed" version of a short story versus the original? what value would it have as a reader? i can see the value as a writer--it'd be a great exercise, sure. but to share it with others?

As a stand-alone piece, why indeed? But I think groups of such "rehashed" stories by a variety of authors could be quite a lot of fun. Like tribute albums. Inessential, perhaps even artistically bankrupt, but appealing nonetheless. I would read a book consisting of a of contemporary writers covering Poe stories, or a bunch of familiar classics (Bartleby, The Metamorphosis, To Build a Fire, that kind of thing), especially if I were particularly interested in a few of the names involved.

george saunders would be great at this

i suppose there have been a lot of jokey articles with someone doing Classic A in the style of Other Famous Writer B.

you mean like a parody?

Yeah, parodies would be less interesting.

finn, wide sargasso sea

Faulkner's "The Bear" is a remake of Moby-Dick, but with more semi-colons.

also irregular periods and heavy bleeding

it would be kinda cool to do a dirty projectors thing and re-write a book that you love from memory.

-- Jordan, Tuesday, 12 August 2008 21:26 (Yesterday) Link

this is how all books are written though

'Wide Sargasso Sea' uses a couple of characters from an earlier work, but tells their story as a prequel--very much not a rewrite of 'Jane Eyre'

Pierre Menard's Don Quixote to thread? (Okay, so it's not actually real...)

Could Ulysses count (w/r/t the Odyssey)?

Although I'm not sure where the line between inspiration and remaking lives in this discussion, I liked Duncan's "The Brothers K" and LOVED "The Hakawati" by Alameddine. Remaking, or doing a modern spin on "Arabian Nights", the book feels classic while making its muse modern. Really fun.

silence dogood = cibula?

Not sure what cibula is, but if that's good, then that's what I am.

oh nevermind

http://www.cave17.com/?p=208

Faulkner's "The Bear" is a remake of Moby-Dick, but with more semi-colons.

-- wmlynch, Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

except the bear is better

Also things like the comic book version of "City of Glass"

-- Casuistry, Tuesday, August 12, 2008 6:22 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

btw this is better than the novel

a friend once pointed out the similarity in premise of Brock Clarke's For Those of Us Who Need Such Things to Donald Barthelme's I Bought a Little City but to call it a cover version is probably not warranted

Faulkner's "The Bear" is a remake of Moby-Dick, but with more semi-colons.

-- wmlynch, Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

except the bear is better

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, August 14, 2008 4:45 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

RONG

Yeah I dunno. I love The Bear but better than Moby-Dick?

I prefer Faulkner to Melville as a matter of course, and I think stream-of-consciousness chapter beats leaden philosophy chapter every time in my tally.

btw this is better than the novel

Yes, I have said this more than anything else on ILB.

haha

http://images.contentreserve.com/ImageType-100/1314-1/%7B28499C8B-2238-4517-AB46-16449CCFD660%7DImg100.jpg

oh man, sorry it wasn't supposed to be that big.

How about those 800 million books that are sequels to Jane Austen books, or redos? Including a choose your own adventure one! I have never read any of these, but I am glad they exist if only bcz it makes it SUPER EASY to buy bday/xmas gifts for my sister-in-law. She completely eats that shit up.

Bringing together Jane Austen's most beloved characters and storylines-a clever, playful, interactive, and highly entertaining approach to the wildly popular novels in which you, the reader, decide the outcome.

Name: Elizabeth Bennet.
Mission: To marry both prudently and for love.
How? It's entirely up to the reader.

The journey begins in Pride and Prejudice but quickly takes off on a whimsical Austen adventure of the reader's own creation. A series of choices leads the reader into the plots and romances of Austen's other works. Choosing to walk home from Netherfield Hall means falling into Sense and Sensibility and the infatuating spell of Mr. Willoughby. Accepting an invitation to Bath leads to Northanger Abbey and the beguiling Henry Tilney. And just where will Emma's Mr. Knightley fit in to the quest for a worthy husband? It's all up to the reader.

A labyrinth of love and lies, scandals and scoundrels, misfortunes and marriages, Lost in Austen will delight and challenge any Austen lover.

And novelizations of movies that were adapted from books, do those count?