Word: novels
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...course, not everyone sticks to six. NPR's On the Media held a 12-word-novel contest, which yielded several gems, including listener Brenda J. Wolfe's "My sister had written Father's obituary. He is survived by one daughter." The contest was held last November in honor of National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo...
...London-based production company New Adventures, have redrawn the international theatrical landscape, attracting huge new audiences to their inventive and emotionally charged shows. On Aug. 22, at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, they launch Dorian Gray, a tale of modern celebrity meltdown based on Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. "It's very dark," says Richard Winsor, who dances the title role. "The book holds things back - but we're not holding anything back. Sexually, we're going further than we've ever gone...
...Wilde's novel, which has a strong homoerotic subtext, tells of a handsome young man-about-town in Victorian London who, as the years pass, never seems to look any older, despite living a debauched and ultimately murderous life. Up in a locked attic, however, his portrait grows increasingly hideous, as each of his crimes leaves its mark. For several years, Bourne turned the story over in his mind. One of the elements that fascinated him was its treatment of male beauty. "You have it, and then you lose it," he says, recalling his own youth as a dancer...
...Dorian Gray idea gained impetus when Bourne read Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and learned that Wilde's novel (which Booker describes as a "black fairy tale") headed the list of classic tragedies. And then there was the accidental death earlier this year of the actor Heath Ledger. "You have this beautiful, talented being dropped into another world - Hollywood - where everyone wants to get in with you," says Bourne. "Would he have died if he'd stayed in Australia, I wonder, or was he a victim of modern celebrity...
...this wrought on his psyche that finally unlocked the story for Bourne. His Dorian would be a contemporary young man - the It Boy - who is discovered by a media power broker and transformed into a cultural icon, shedding his humanity along the way. The homosexuality hinted at in the novel would be explicit, and it would be fading billboards, not a painting in the attic, that would serve as a metaphor for the damage to Dorian's soul...