Word: jonathans
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...vast, untapped market," says Jonathan Bock, a former sitcom writer (Hangin' with Mr. Cooper), whose Grace Hill Media helps sell Hollywood films to Christian tastemakers. He pitches media outlets like Catholic Digest and The 700 Club and has created sermons and Bible-study guides and marketed such movies as The Lord of the Rings, Signs, The Rookie and, yes, Elf. "The ground was softened before The Passion," says Bock. "There are hundreds of Christian critics and Jewish writers and ministers who are writing about films." And millions of the faithful who see them. A July 2004 study by George Barna...
...junk, collectible card games and heavy-metal album covers: J.K. Rowling, of course, but also Neil Gaiman, Phillip Pullman, China Mieville and George R.R. Martin. Now a fortysomething silver-haired British book editor named Susanna Clarke has done something even they couldn't. She has written Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury; 800 pages), a chimera of a novel that combines the dark mythology of fantasy with the delicious social comedy of Jane Austen into a masterpiece of the genre that rivals Tolkien...
...makes a certain kind of cosmic sense that a writer of fantastical literature should come from a relatively mundane background. Clarke, the daughter of a Methodist minister, was born in Nottingham, went to Cambridge and then took a series of publishing jobs in London. The first glimmers of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell came to her during a year she spent teaching English in Bilbao, Spain. "I had a kind of waking dream," Clarke remembers, "about a man in 18th century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some...
...Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in an alternative version of early 19th century England, one in which magic is real but on the wane, to the point that there are only two practicing sorcerers left in England. The pair are a pleasing study in contrasts: Mr. Norrell is exceptionally learned but shy and fussy. "He is," a character remarks, "at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the age and the most tedious." Strange is charming, young, fashionable and romantic. Clarke could have called the book Sense and Sensibility if the title weren't already taken...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...