Our Blog

Philadelphia! On June 6th, come out and join author E. B. Hudspeth and Quirk Books to celebrate the release of The Resurrectionist at Indy Hall!

Facebook: RSVP on Facebook! Not required, but it’s nice to know who is coming.

It’s any author’s worst nightmare: another, really well established writer comes out with a novel with the exact same title. There’s the jealousy, the awkward cocktail-party explanations (“no, I wrote the other one”), and the incalculable damage to the first book’s SEO.

Dante Aligheri has been dead for a while, so his reaction to Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno will likely be limited to a little grave-spinning. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put the two writers head-to-head for a little comparison challenge!

In this corner: best-selling novelist, armchair cryptologist, and occasional songwriter Dan “Dan” Brown! And in this corner, Il Sommo Poeta, the Father of the Italian Language himself, Dante “Dan” Aligheri!

DING!

Admit it: you wish your name were more interesting. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but a Daenerys just wouldn’t sound as awesome if she were a Dana (no offense, of course, to the Danas of the world—I’m sure you’re all lovely people).

Westerosians get names full of weird letters and strange spellings, but we normals are saddled with names that are…kinda boring. Luckily, English has a vast, rich, and totally weird history of being spelled completely differently, once upon a time. Forget your first pet’s name or the name of the street where you grew up—all you need to spiff up your moniker are a few forgotten graphemes. Swap out the appropriate sounds in your name for their ancient equivalent and you’ll be mistaken for an Enya album in no time.

It’s human nature to imagine what your favorite book characters get up to off the page: what they do on weekends, what they make for dinner, what they like to read. Which got me thinking: what would my favorite characters from classic children’s chapter books read if they were browsing the YA shelves today? Luckily for my fictional friends, these days there’s a YA book for every kind of teenager–now I’ve just got to find a way to get the books into the books.

It almost goes without saying that Julius Caesar has a lot in common with Kanye West. Both are (or were) rulers of sprawling empires, both have royally healthy egos, and both of them sport the same straight-across-the-brow haircut.

But what does go without saying is the sayings they have in common—until now, that is. This Ides of March, see if you can figure out who said it: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or one of Kanye’s monster hits.

Photo by Thought Catalog from Pexels

It’s easy to assume that fan fiction has only been around as long as the internet (or at least since Spockanalia #1). But for as long as people have written stories, other people have written other stories using the same characters. As with many peculiar permutations of human behavior, the internet didn’t create fan fiction, it just made it way easier to share: the dead-tree age of Ye Olde Fanfictionne can’t hold a candle to the wealth and weirdness of the intertubes.

In fact, some of literature’s most revered authors could (completely anachronistically) be said to have penned some fan-fic stories themselves. Here are four of our our fave famous fan-fic-ers.