New Classics to Win Back the Blokes

Following the shock-horror-gasp revelation the other day that women are better readers than blokes, and Jean Hannah Edelstein's plea on The Guardian blog, Bookninja is announcing a contest to "remasculate" books in order to repatriate male readers.

You need to change the title and basic plot summary (one sentence, max) of a famous book—and if the book is by a woman, “masculate” her as well. There are bonus points for reinventing the cover (as in the funky remake of Iris Murdoch's The Sea at left.) More inspiration here (though you may never recover from titles like The Ass is Singing by Boris Lessing!)

You can also join the Bookninja group on Facebook and if you want your literary updates intravenously instantaneously, you can subscribe to his feed on Twitter.

Anyway, off you go, and don't paste your great ideas here, go along to George's blog.

Rebranding - Bookninja Style

How you like the saucy new cover for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

Yes, it is a joke, sort of.

Earlier this month Bookninja asked :

Are top novelists being rebranded to meet the purchasing habits of an embiggened sector of stupid readers?

in response to this very worrying article in The Independent about novelist Margaret Drabble being under pressure from her publishers to "rebrand" her fiction ... i.e. dumb down.

Bookninja invited blog readers to send in their cover designs for the classics rebranded as more popular genres, and many rose to the challenge with hilarious results. You are invited to vote for the winner by email, but voting closes today so you need to be quick.

Postscript :

Think you can do even better? Now the Guardian is inviting you to send in your own efforts.