Leanne Ogasawara at the Los Angeles Times:
“Call me Ishmael.”
Considered one of the greatest opening lines in all of literary history, it must have been almost irresistible for the acclaimed novelist Xiaolu Guo to resist using it for the title of her 2025 retelling of the world’s most famous whale tale, “Moby-Dick”. But Guo makes a major change; for in her story, the young and sometimes gloomy male protagonist has been transformed into an adventurous young woman.
This has been such a great few years for retellings of the classics — from Barbara Kingsolver’s updated David Copperfield to Salman Rushdie’s zany Don Quixote. And Percival Everett’s novel “James,” a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, took the lion’s share of the literary prizes in 2024, including the Pulitzer. There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites — and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types.
Guo’s recasting of Ishmaelle is no exception.
More here.
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