Came home and found a parcel on my desk… whatever can it be? I opened it and found… my very own gift wrapped copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Thanks yale. Well considered review to follow should I ever overcome my revulsion enough to read it!
A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an online book store webpage promoting a new book that is coming out called "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". At the time I (and no doubt many others) was hopeful that it would yet turn out to be a hoax of one sort or another. As time has marched inexorably onwards, it seems less and less likely that it is an elaborate joke of questionable taste… and it appears more and more to be an actual publication that will indubitably cause a most pernicious assault on the sensibilities of every Austen fan worldwide!
No. It is quite beyond our control and ’tis all together too shocking to contemplate. Hopefully the purveyors of this filth will have the good sense to include a small bottle of smelling salts with each copy that the reader will inevitably require to revive themselves once they have been completely undone by the horrors which no doubt await one in this literary abomination!
PS – Preorder your copies here 🙂
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A week or so ago I was bitching about my inability to obtain the latest Jasper Fforde novel , First Among Sequels (the next installment in the Thursday Next series) in a cover that matches the rest of the series. Yes this stupid little thing which shouldn’t be even remotely significant on any level has the potential to piss me off every single time I look at my book case simply by destroying my (somewhat hyperactive) sense of order. But there was a light at the end of the tunnel!!! The gorgeous Miss Cindy Lou who is currently residing in the UK offered to send me a copy of the book as it was released over there which happened to be with a nice matching paperback pulp fiction style cover:
Yay!!! I’m to be spared from the years of annoyance of being forced into having a mismatched series! The importance of which means my bookcase won’t be visually assaulting me at every opportunity… and I won’t start to twitch every time I look at them. Huzzah!!! Three cheers for Miss Cindy Lou who has moved from being one of the understanding people in my life who merely tolerates my often irrational idiosyncracies to now officially being an enabler 🙂
Yesterday I drove the Small Child to school and there was a package! Ah the book! Here ’tis! I opened it all excited and there was the book alright… but in the slightly larger hardcover version not the paperback version that was on the picking slip. I emailed the distributor and pointed out the error. They said it was mistake in the listing and they apologized for sending the wrong version of the book and have offered to refund Miss Cindy for the purchase. However….
Borys: Guess what? You know the book I wanted that Cindy was sending to me?
Yale: Yeah
Borys: It arrived today in the mail.
Borys: But they accidentally sent me the hardcover version.
Yale: LOL.
Borys: They made a mistake. They don’t even stock the paperback.
Yale: Dang
Borys: I got an email from the book supplier they are going to refund it.
Borys: and I don’t have to return this copy...
Yale: Well, that’s not so bad – you don’t have to send it back 🙂
Borys: No
Borys: But :$
Borys: You know I’m still going to have to find a paperback copy right?
Yale: Yeah I know 🙂
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Should this not turn out to be some sort of bad joke the perpetrators ought be hung, drawn and quartered…. Have you no compassion for my poor nerves!
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
Quirk Books
By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
5-1/4 x 8 in; 320 pp ; Paperback
ISBN 9781594743344
ISBN10 1594743347
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature.
Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn. He lives in Los Angeles.
Like many people I collect ‘things’. I collect some things deliberately – like books, DVDs and Magic 8 Balls. Other things I seem to collect almost inadvertently like bottles of nail polish and drug pens (you know the ones with advertising on them for pharmaceuticals?). Anyway, when I am collecting something that I intend to keep it makes me all warm and fuzzy when it looks all nice and uniform on my shelves. Say for example I have been collecting The West Wing on DVD which I have done because it’s one of my favourite shows and I’ve watched them all about three times and I know I’ll watch it again some day and also…. I just want to own my own copies. Seasons 1 & 2 originally came out in those chunky cardboard boxsets (half season boxes at that) which I duly purchased. A year or so later they released Seasons 1 – 4 in those double sized plastic DVD cases which vexed me somewhat because they no longer matched my old cardboard ones. So I repurchased Seasons 1 & 2 when I bought Seasons 3 & 4 and resold my old cardboard ones on eBay. No big deal – I’m just a bit anal retentive like that… but whatever. Then Season 5 was released and it was the same which good … but when the final Seasons 6 & 7 were released they were in single DVD cases and seeing that I had no desire to go and spend the money over again – they no longer make a cohesive aesthetic set on my bookcase…. and this annoys the living crap out of me 🙁
It’s not just The West Wing either – it was The Sopranos too, The Harry Potter DVDs, Bewitched and countless other so called ‘sets’ (which by definition implies that they will be a group or combination of things that are similar in design and/or function) too… lots of them do it for some reason. And it’s not just limited to DVD collections either – Books. ‘They’ – the powers that be (read complete and utter knobs who design and market stuff) do it to books too.
I’ve been reading Jasper Fforde lately – in particular the Thursday Next series. I know, I know it’s so unusual for me to get into a sci-fi/fantasy series given that I’m usually more into classic literature. But Fforde’s sci-fi novels incorporate lots of references to the classics (Bronte, Gaskell, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Elliot and of course Shakespeare) and there’s lots of clever little literary in-jokes which creates the most marvellous juxtapositions between highbrow literature and lowbrow absurdity that it makes for absolutely ‘hang onto your hat’ hilarious reading. So far I’ve read ‘The Eyre Affair’, ‘Lost in a Good Book’ and ‘The Well of Lost Plots’ and am about to start reading the fourth novel in the series ‘Something Rotten’. I have also purchased two of his other novels ‘The Big Over Easy and ‘The Fourth Bear’ which are in a related by different series based around Detective Jack Spratt. Where was I going with this again….? Oh yeah. The damn covers. I have been looking to purchase the fifth novel in the Thursday Next series which is called ‘First Among Sequels’ and guess what? They’ve changed the artwork (on the Australian released version of the novel – the UK cover matches nicely) so that it looks NOTHING LIKE THE REST OF THE SERIES!!! Why???
Fuckers. Needless to say I haven’t purchased this new book yet because the cover sets my aesthetic teeth on edge. I’ve been keeping an eye out for it hoping that it will eventually be released with a similar design to the rest of them but so far my efforts have been twarted and at this rate I’ll likely end up ordering a copy on Amazon.co.uk which will cost me twice the prices 🙁 Soooo not happy with my wash!
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