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.
(by Robin Parry)
Imagine if Shakespeare
Green Eggs and Hamlet was the second place entry in a contest the Washington Post ran in 1999, in which readers were invited to combine the works of two authors and provide a suitable blurb.
“Merged Books" or “Literary Mash-ups” have been around for some time, but I've only recently discovered them, when the (U.K.) Guardian Books Blog posted about them recently.
Here are some more odd collaborations from the Washington Post and the Guardian.
Where's Walden? – Alas, 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. (Sandra Hull, Arlington)
~~~
Machiavelli's The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic 
~~~
Looking for Mr. Godot -- A young woman waits for Mr. Right to enter her life. She has a loooooong wait. (by Jonathan Paul)
~~~
At the Brokeback Mountains of Madness by Annie Proulx
The Remains of the Day of the Jackal by Kazuo Ishiguro and Frederick Forsyth - A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles deGaulle.
And a few from The Biblio Files:
1984, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
The Robber Brideshead Revisited by Margaret Atwood
Now it's your turn. Use book titles, or try it with movie titles, plays, poems. Mix and mash!
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
skypixie0
jlsathre
Deven McKay
Ersatz Reader
Donna Ski
Christine Bollerud
Salon.com
Comments
Here's the winning entry to the Washington Post contest: Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities – An '80s yuppie is denied books. He does not object, or even notice.
I think Green Eggs and Hamlet was better.
hold on, I gotta go back and reread them all. I mean, you know, laughter being good for the soul and all.....
rrrrrrated!
Really rollicking fun post! Will try to come up with some others.
Bees Tone, here's another from the Washington Post to inspire you:
"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.
Fear and Loathing in Two Cities, by Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Dickens -- A drug-addled journalist and his drunken attorney confront duality, revolution, and resurrection amidst the political and social turmoil of late-sixties London and Paris. And skip out on the hotel tab.
Juliet -- Good one! They're a strange pair, but he's great with the children.
Coyote, Mr. Bitters -- Another sample from the WaPo to consider: "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?
Okay, let's see ...
Stephen King and Jane Austen: Mansfield's Lot
Whereby a poor relative comes to live with her richer ones, realizes she's in love with her distant cousin and then becomes a vampire slayer and has to pretty much stake everyone in the countryside.
Great Frankspectations! by Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley
A heartwarming story whereby a young orphan, through a series of serendipitous circumstances, after many, many ... many pages, including long, involved descriptions of streets and street corners, finds his long lost relatives have been in his life all along, helping him without truly knowing who he was. Alas, he then discovers they are a family of scientists who abandoned him at his 'birth' because he was their hideous creation made in the lab. He takes them all to Antarctica on a trip, destroys them all and wanders off into the white snow to die.
Odetteroulette, these are horrifying, simply horrifying. Your allusion to Frankenstein seems especially apt, the way we're grafting plots together every which way.
Juliet -- "stinging criticism"? Ouch.
A bittersweet, science fiction tale of a group of children in Russia who fold time, search for their father and meet a man who has wasted his life, and travel with him into a tesseract before returning him to a life of nothingness. See the sequels "Dragons in the Cherry Orchard" (an unexpected gunshot!) and "The Three Sisters and Their Swiftly Tilting Planet," where nobody goes to Moscow.
I think I may have gone too far. heh.
Odetteroulette -- you're out of control! I loved A Wrinkle in Time when I was young, but moved on before the sequels came out. I think you're on to something in thinking that they would be improved by adding a little Chekhov.
OK I'll play along,
The Tell-Tale Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allen Poe, in which the secrets of British atrocities in colonial Africa are revealed by a seismic pulsation emanating from beneath the jungle floor.
Mr. Rogers Meets Hammerstein - You get the picture: Boys and Girls singing along with Mr. Rogers while he butchers the classics! Says Mr. Rogers, "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for grand piano lessons..." "Now, boys and girls, let's put on our tuxedos and sing in the octave of D minor."
The Lord of the Poohs--by JRR Tolkien and AA Milne
Wherein a lovable bear and his friends Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Rabbit find the One Ring and venture forth to destroy it until Pooh gets stuck in a hole while eating honey. Watch Rabbit struggle for his sooouuuulll!!
One ring to rule them all
One ring to find them
One ring to bring them honey
And in the darkness, er, bind them.
Hmm. That might turn into a commercial about irregularity though. hee hee
Gustav takens a trip, gets a little horny, and goes through seven stages of not feeling really well.
The adventures of Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and John Kellogg as they hitchhike to Michigan in search of kicks and a good breakfast.
In this sequel to Like Water for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the pre-pubescent nouveau-industrialist takes his elevator to St. Louis, where he embarks on a lavender-scented memory play, finally coming to the stunning realization that his mother was really a vermicious knid.
libertarius -- outstanding! have you been inspired by Poe's 200th birthday?
Juliet Waters -- Mickey Rourke as The Squirrel - Perfect casting!
Just Cathy -- I guess I asked for it, didn't I?...
CatBastard -- Yes! I think Mickey Rourke might be right for the movie version of this one, too.
Paris Pace -- You stumped me with Dare to Discipline and Punish. I had to look them up. That's an impressive range: James Dobson to Michel Foucault. From one extreme to another. Excellent!
I Will Wear A Purple Crayon by Harold. A character from a popular children's book refuses to age, and remains determined to re-draw himself until the end of time.
MJwycha -- I love it! It's grrrrrrreat!
Squillo - (I like your name, btw) Excellent! I was thinking about combining Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Glass Menagerie, but it didn't really work. Yours does.
Paris Pace -- I don't know if the original contest had a rule about the titles being from fiction, but there's no such rule in the OS version. In fact, I don't think there are any rules at all.
Juliet Waters -- Good one!
Seven Western misfits ride South to Old Vienna, where they defeat scores of Mexican bandits and get Ziggy Freud to help their leader with his coke addiction.
Love rests on no Foundation by Rumi
More Foundation
More and more frequently the ocean
dissolved me and I became a mountain
that accumulated on my world, protruding
dry, so eager to no longer be wet
to grow and build with ash and fire
to burn brightly and replenish my soil
I would not sink
in you or ever
drowned, you would still be there
surrounding me, but outside
not needed, but encompassing
Unfortunately I don't have soil
Instead I have pools
and water and other damp cold
things which rule out burning.
So be careful, I mean it,
I give you fair warning:
This kind of water draws
the life out of any
fire; nor can we
build on it, have a calm
rational discussion.
There is no reason for this, only
a drowning dog's logic about oxygen.
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining life,
And strolls the New York streets with style
"Look out, he's got a knife!'
" Call that a knife?", he seems to grin!
How neatly scares the putz,
"Now there's a knife!" he says, and then
He slices off his nuts!
When Atticus turns down neighbor Maudie's marriage ultimatum, Jem and Scout are so disappointed they run away to Los Angeles. Boo comes out of hiding to track them down, and in the meantime discovers an amazing talent for singing and dancing. He is discovered by a Hollywood producer, Jem and Scout see him in the movies and seek him out. They are reunited and the kids become big stars too, drawing bigger audiences even than young Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Atticus leaves Alabama to become their agent, and Maudie follows, becoming Boo's mistress. They all live happily ever after. Except for Tom Robinson, who did not get shot in the back, but escaped to New York and played the drums in Charlie Parker's band. The movie version of the story glosses over Tom's heroin addiction to maintain its PG rating.
Just before his death by dissipation and grief, the last Mughal of India is whisked away by British Secret Services to a protection program in Texas, revived, and given a new identity, where he runs a small pool hall and pretends to be a sad, whiskery cowboy named Sam.
Required reading under Obama.
Young Stephen Dedalus' vision of Hell leads him back to Catholicism then into a life of rebellion against Freudian analysis. He comes to realize that Jesus and the Devil are archetypes of the collective unconscious and are reconciled by individuation and saying the rosary. Then he buggers off to find his father.
Rob and CatBastard -- An impressive collaboration from a new duo: CatAmant St. Bastard.
hyblaean -- I was not familiar with the poems you combined, but I looked them up. Thanks for pointing me in a direction I don't usually travel. Your tribute to Atwood and Rumi is amazing.
Procopius -- Brilliant! Now if we can get Emily Dickinson's Hope is the Thing With Feathers in there somehow, it will be completely bird-brained.
Greg Correll -- I see this as a Bollywood musical starring Robert Duvall and Ben Kingsley.
Carol Berg -- Thanks!
hatchetface -- Yikes. That book will no doubt be about 1500 pages with paragraphs that last for pages. I'll wait for the SparkNotes version.
An opera loving multi-lingual Japanese Neurosurgeon spends a weekend south of the border unraveling for us the neurotransmitters responsible for the musical and linguistic talents of the characters and as well as the bio-chemical changes in the country that caused its political turmoil, all while listening to Verdi and Puccini
scared grandma -- Bel Canto and Saturday? I love it! There's a current of musical theater running through a lot of the previous suggestions. If you could squeeze Disney's Song of the South into this one, we'd be ready for Broadway.
Nora Burke's husband pretends to be dead, not to catch her in infidelity but as part of a real estate scam to extricate themselves from that crummy glen by ripping off the likes of Michael Dara.
"A Tale of Fear and Loathing"
A long long long tale of a bad acid trip during the revolution in France.
Also, how about "Smilla's Sense of Falling Cedars":
A young woman from Greenland walks across Puget Sound to a small island to solve a mystery while harvesting strawberries. Along the way she confronts prejudice due to her ancestry and denies her love for a Japanese American Girl.