Aka King Lear in Iowa. A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.
Retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A United States Army officer/trained assassin is sent into the depths of a southeast Asian jungle to seek out a renegade colonel and terminate his command during the Vietnam War.
An homage to Jane Austen's Emma. Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) are pampered upper-class girls who care less about getting good grades than wearing the right clothes and being as popular as possible. But Cher also has an innate urge to help those less fortunate. Cher is looking for the perfect boyfriend, whom she ends up finding where she least expected.
Yet another take on Homer's The Odyssey. Inman, a young Confederate soldier, who is injured during the explosive 1864 battle of Petersburg, Virginia, is struggling to make his way home to Cold Mountain, NC, where his beloved Ada awaits him. In Inman's absence, Ada befriends Ruby, who helps her keep up her late father's farm. Meanwhile, in his travels, Inman encounters a menagerie of interesting and colorful characters.
Owes much to Homer's The Odyssey. Plus a little nod to the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels. A successful Hollywood director disguises himself as a bum and sets off to see America from the bottom up. In the midst of the brutality and despair, he makes a valuable discovery-- that what the downtrodden need most is laughter.
A retelling of E.M. Forster's Howard's End. Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
Based on King Lear by William Shakespeare. An aging warlord decides to split his kingdom between his three sons, who will live in three separate castles. The two eldest sons are quite happy, but the youngest thinks his father has gone mad, and predicts that it won't be long until the two older brothers are fighting with each other.
Based on Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Viola becomes furious when she learns that her high school, Cornwall, has just cut the girl's soccer team. So furious, in fact, that she takes advantage of her twin brother Sebastian skipping town for a few weeks to take his place at his school, Illyria, so she can join the soccer team there. But her disguise as her brother leads to major complications when she falls in love with her soccer-playing roommate and the girl he's in love with falls in love with "Sebastian".
Female version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
Adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Cameron is the new kid in school who becomes smitten with the beautiful Bianca. But Bianca's overprotective and domineering father forbids Bianca to date unless her older sister Kat, an surly and hostile senior, does. In a bid to get Kat a boyfriend, Cameron sets up a plan to have the school stud, Joey Donnar, bribe Patrick Verona, an outcast senior with a rumor-filled past, to take Kat out on dates so he can go to the school's homecoming dance with Bianca. However, neither Patrick or Kat expect their relationship to lead to something so much more.
A reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.
Hamlet with hounds. A tale reminiscent of Hamlet that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
Very carefully based on The Odyssey by Homer. Ulysses, published in 1922, is considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. The book simply chronicles one day in the fictional life of Leopold Bloom, but it introduces stream of consciousness as a literary method and broaches many subjects controversial to its day.
Adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. This musical sets the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet against a backdrop of the rivalry of two street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, in New York of the 1950s. A young woman who is sister to the Sharks leader has her first taste of love with the former head of the Jets.
Perhaps the title sounds familiar? Like Raymond Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, perhaps? What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank establishes Nathan Englander beyond all doubt as the heir to Roth, Malamud, and Babel. A tour de force. The title story, inspired by Carver's masterpiece, is a comic classic, a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game.