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Write a literary mash-up, get a laptop

By Carolyn Kellogg
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BoingBoing is giving away one free HP Envy laptop to the best literary mash-up posted on its site before Friday. Sure, ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ kicked off the genre, but the blog’s not asking for quite that -- the call is for entrants to ‘rewrite a scene from one classic book in the incongruous literary style of another.’

As of this writing, there are only about 30 entries, and they come out of the gate heavy on the science fiction: ‘Star Trek’ invades ‘A Christmas Carol,’ then Gabriel Garcia Marquez goes to Europa.

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But some have ventured the high literary: One has matched Marquez with Hemingway; another is Hemingway done via David Foster Wallace. And J.D. Salinger’s Book of Genesis and Edgar Allan Poe doing ‘Hamlet’ are pretty phenomenal.

Zombies, though, are hard to resist. Stick them in ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ and you’re in for a real horror show.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Carolyn Kellogg

Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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