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This week is Jane Austen’s birthday (she’ll be turning 241, happy birthday, Jane!) and to celebrate, we’re imagining how some of her most beloved characters might make use of one of our more Austenian modern conveniences: the Missed Connections boards on Craigslist. What if, instead of being forced to stoically endure their tumultuous feelings, Jane Austen’s characters were able to empty their hearts out onto the internet? Below we imagine what some of their posts may have looked like.

The main theme park in the new HBO show Westworld is centered around giving wealthy patrons a realistic (yet safe) western-style experience. The park is populated with very lifelike robotic “hosts” that are programmed to do whatever the attendees want.

Here are three characters who always seem strangely calm and collected, no matter what the situation is. So calm and collected it is almost as though they know they’re in a hyper-realistic simulation that cannot have any real world consequences for them.

[Photo by Oxana Lyashenko on Unsplash]

It’s time for the drawing. “Now, let us begin, or we shall be here all day,” Rabbit says as he crosses to the glass ball with all the names, each roughly scrawled in crayon. Rabbit reaches in, digs his hand deep into the ball with a great rustling and bustling and pulls out a slip of paper.

“Let it not be me,” Winnie-the-Pooh says deep inside his fluff-filled head. “Think it over, think it under. Think it true. It’s not me. It’s not me.”

When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be able to step through the pages of my favorite book into the world its words described. A common fantasy, right? But now that virtual reality devices are hitting the mainstream market, my dream isn’t so farfetched any more. VR headsets will be on sale in time for the holidays, which made us at Quirk wonder…what would it be like if someone made games featuring our favorite fictional realities?

In Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, the characters quickly come to realize the advantages of using a tesseract (the titular wrinkle in time) in order to travel instantaneously to other planets. The Newbery Award-winning novel tells the story of the Murry children as they rescue their father from Camazotz, a dark planet of conformity. But as sequels to A Wrinkle in Time demonstrate, tesseracting can take the Murrys anywhere or anytime, from the farthest reaches of the galaxy into the tiniest cells.  Since the Murrys have unlimited frequent flyer miles to tesser to any time and place, we’ve got some recommendations for their next vacations!

This past Friday was the National Day of Listening and as far as unofficial holidays go, this is one we can all get behind. Created to celebrate the rich histories of our friends and families, National Day of Listening encourages participants to swap stories with those we love most. Here at Quirk Books, we don’t want the fun to stop when you run out of words. We’ve gathered monologues from some of our favorite playwrights to keep the party going. Because the only family drama we want is a tiff over who gets to play the ingénue.