Great literary works adapted for the opera stage are not exactly a dime a dozen, but they are plentiful and varied in form and plot. Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd” based on the novel by Herman Melville comes to mind, as does American composer Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” adapted from the John Steinbeck novella. But the recent announcement from the New York Met about commissioning new operas inspired by two quite contemporary works of fiction had my eyebrows vaulting skyward.
The most surprising, perhaps because of the scope and complexity of the novel, is “Lincoln in the Bardo,” the 2017 Booker Prize winner by George Saunders that combines quirky portraits of deceased troubled souls zipping about in a graveyard with a heart-wrenching depiction of the 16th president visiting the tomb in the same location of his beloved son Willie night after night. Woven deftly into the plot are dozens of facts from historical research the author conducted about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War that lend additional heft to the narrative. It would seem that Brooklyn-based composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have their work cut out for them as they go about reweaving this rich tapestry of a literary masterpiece, which some critics have called the best novel of its decade. The opera will have a workshop presentation at New York’s Chautauqua Institution in July before a formal premiere at the Los Angeles Opera in February 2026 and a run at the Met the following October.
Also transformed for the Met is Berkeley author Michael Chabon’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” from Bay Area composer Mason Bates and his librettist Gene Scheer, which debuted at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music on Nov. 15 and will open the Met’s 2025 season in September.
In the pipeline: Special anthologies are coming our way from the Knopf publishing house in honor of the centennial anniversary of The New Yorker magazine. On Feb. 4, both “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025” and “A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025” will hit bookstore shelves. The former, curated by magazine fiction editor Deborah Treisman, collates short stories by J.D. Salinger, Annie Proulx (her “Brokeback Mountain” first appeared in its pages), Shirley Jackson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yiyun Li. New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young selected the works for the second anthology, including poems from Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, e e cummings, W.S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Sandra Cisneros and Amanda Gorman. The short stories cover a whopping 1,152 pages; the poetry edition clocks in at 1,102, and both retail for $50.
Online freebies galore: Hollywood has the opera stages of the world outgunned when it comes to turning literary classics into fodder for the silver screen, and YouTube has taken advantage of it by establishing a curated channel of them called “Cult Cinema Classics.” You’ll find director Dave Fleischer’s 1939 animated “Gulliver’s Travels,” a double Oscar nominee, in the lineup, along with that same year’s “Of Mice and Men,” directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and Burgess Meredith as George and a best-picture winner. Also on the list are 1952’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner; 1970’s “Jane Eyre,” with Susannah York and George C. Scott; and 1950’s “New York Confidential,” starring Richard Conte and Broderick Crawford. To date, more than 80 films can be viewed for free; find the list HERE.
Some unique awards: For the first time in its 50-year history, the National Book Critics Circle is announcing the long list of nominees in all seven categories of its annual awards, on the stated theory that it will allow the jury of working critics and book review editors to highlight more worthy works of literature.
NBCC president Heather Scott Partington noted in the statement that “The best books of 2024 were narratives of resilience, interrogation and imagination. They asked us to question power, art and genre.”
There are 12 nominees in its books in translation category and 10 in the other six.
The fiction lists consists of “The Anthropologists” by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury), “Beautyland” by Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna (Riverhead), “Godwin” by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon), “Great Expectations” by Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth), “James” by Percival Everett (Doubleday), “My Friends” by Hisham Matar (Random House), “Sister Deborah” by Scholastique Mukasonga (Archipelago), “Small Rain” by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and “Us Fools” by Nora Lange (Two Dollar Radio).
The other categories are nonfiction, autobiography (the late Alexei Navalny’s “Patriot” is notably in the running), criticism, biography and poetry. The NBCC awards, founded at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in 1974, accept no nominations from publishers and charge no fees for entry.
Finalists will be announced on Jan.23, and the winners will emerge March 20 at a ceremony at the New School in New York City. Find more information at www.bookcritics.org.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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