Halloween Bash: Dead Celebrity Costumes

Halloween is almost here! This has been the cool year for celebrity deaths, inspiring plenty of great costume ideas!


Edgar Allan Poe


Virginia Woolf


Miguel de Cervantes

More Costumes from our Favorite Writers:

Here's another sneak peek at what to expect this Halloween:



Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O'Connor

And here's a snapshot from LM's 2008 Halloween Bash, when absolutely everyone went as Sarah Palin--how embarrassing!



John Milton, Christine de Pisan, Charles Dickens, Lao Tzu

LM's Halloween Countdown!

It's October, and that means that it's almost time for our annual Halloween Bash! A few of our fabulous writers are already working on their costumes:


The Venerable Bede



Dorothy Parker

Stay tuned for more updates!

Becoming a Better Jane

Literary Makeovers was first formed according to one guiding principal: that Jane Austen could use some freaking help. That's one reason we're delighted with these new books: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Because not only did Jane Austen desperately need a makeover, her work did, too! I mean, have you ever read it? We haven't. But these two books totally look like improvements. Nobody wants to read about a bunch of English people sitting around drinking tea and listening to Oasis or whatever. But when you add monsters--that's a story!





We salute the geniuses behind these spooktacular Austen makeovers. We've also come up with a few ideas of our own, using things that terrify us--just in time for Halloween!

Shakespeare's Sister Shakes It

We have recently discovered that "Shakespeare's Sister" is more than just a Smiths song--it's also a famous section from Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own . We figure that if Shakespeare had had a sister, she would have looked something like this:



Thank goodness she's hypothetical, 'cause they didn't have Dr. 90210 back then!

Samuel Beckett: Absurdly Hot!

Samuel Beckett was a playwright who worked in a style called the "Theatre of the Absurd," which is all surreal and existential and weird and stuff. He wrote that Waiting for Godot play that we didn't see (spoiler: Godot never even shows up! Ripoff!). We did see the Sesame Street version, however, and felt it expertly expressed the universal frustration of the human condition by exploring the nature of the abyss and the delineation between objective and subjective realities.

Anyway, all the existing pictures of Sammy B. are like Black Turtleneck City, ya know? I mean, he looks like a guy who'd say that every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. That is not a good look! Thank god Literary Makeovers was here to help. Behold:

Before ("I can't go on.")

After ("I'll go on!")



























Well well, Samuel Beckett! I believe I do mean love when I say love (now)! Although, to his credit, he always had pretty stylin' hair.

John Keats: Bright (movie) Star

John Keats was already pretty sexy, and he wrote about sexy things sometimes (but also: death). It was inevitable, therefore, that we have a movie about Keats, and so we do! Bright Star premiered at Cannes recently, and chronicles the love affair between the poet and Fanny Brawne (spoiler: it's doomed and he dies of TB like everyone else did in the 19th century). They cast two super sexy leads, of course, and Jane Campion directs the apparently dreamy, visual, and romantic film.

We like all that, and it probably jibes with Keats' poetry, but we've seen lots of movies about "passionate" love affairs, and we think Campion approached the whole thing from the wrong angle. Their real love story is totally boring (they were neighbors, they fell in love and bonded over poetry, blah blah blah). REAL love is when people try to kill each other, and then don't. I've taken the liberty of making a movie poster (like Katie's earlier Keats post!) reflecting this far superior interpretation of doomed 19th century literary love: