new books

[Frank Carmickle]

These are (allegedly) the winners of a recent contest to create a fake
book out of two real, well-known books.

Second Runner-Up: 

Machiavelli's The Little Prince. 
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic children's tale as presented by
Machiavelli. The whimsy of human nature is embodied in many delightful and
intriguing characters, all of whom are executed.

First Runner-Up:

 Green Eggs and Hamlet 
Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head?  I would
not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing.  I would
not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery.

And the Winner:

 Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities. 
An '80s yuppie is denied books. He does not object, or even notice.

Honorable Mentions:

Where's Walden? 
las, the challenge of locating Henry David Thoreau in each richly-detailed
drawing loses its appeal when it quickly becomes clear that he is always
in the woods.

Catch-22 in the Rye 
Holden learns that if you're insane, you'll probably flunk out of Prep
school, but if you're flunking out of prep school, you're probably Not
insane.

2001: A Space Iliad 
The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane 10-year war against the Greeks after
falling victim to the Y2K bug.

Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi 
Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that
the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.

The Maltese Faulkner 
Is the black bird a tortured symbol of Sam's struggles with race and
family?  Does it signify his decay of soul along with the soul of the Old
South? Is it merely a crow, mocking his attempts to understand? Or is it
worth a cool mil?

Jane Eyre Jordan Plucky 
English orphan girl survives hardships to lead the Chicago Bulls to the
NBA championship.

Looking for Mr. Godot. 
A young woman waits for Mr. Right to enter her life. She has loooong wait.

The Scarlet Pimpernel Letter 
An 18th-century English nobleman leads a double life, freeing comely young
adulteresses from the prisons of post-Revolution France.

Lorna Dune 
An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the daughter of a Notorious
rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as a giant worm jockey in
order to impress her.

The Remains of the Day of the Jackal 
A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else,
until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.

The Invisible Man of La Mancha
 Don Quixote discovers a mysterious elixir which renders him invisible. He
proceeds to go on a mad rampage of corruption and terror, attacking
innocent people in the streets and all the while singing To fight the
Invisible Man! until he is finally stopped by a windmill.

Singing in the Black Rain
 A gang of vicious Japanese drug lords beat the stuffings out of Gene
Kelly.

Of Three Blind Mice and Men
 Burgess Meredith has his limbs hacked off by a psychopathic farmer's
wife.  Did you ever see such a sight in your life?

Planet of the Grapes of Wrath
 Astronaut lands on mysterious planet, only to discover that it is his
very own home planet of Earth, which has been taken over by the Joads, a
race of dirt-poor corn farmers who miraculously developed rudimentary
technology and evolved the ability to speak after exposure to nuclear
radiation.

Paradise Lost in Space
 Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying
saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist and two annoying children.

The Exorstentialist
 Camus' psychological thriller about a priest who casts out a demon By
convincing it that there's really no purpose to what it's doing.

Gone With the Wind in the Willows
 A lovely, tempestuous southern belle is inflamed by passion for an
English toad. She pursues him - realizing too late she loves his sardonic
Friend Ratty all along. The death of Mole, against the backdrop of Burning
Atlanta, is one of the finest things of its kind in literature.