#a thousand acres

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

At the age of seventy, after years of consolidating his empire, the Great Lord Hidetora Ichimonji decides to abdicate and divide his domain amongst his three sons. Taro, the eldest, will rule. Jiro, his second son, and Saburo, his third son, will take command of the Second and Third Castles but are expected to obey and support their elder brother. Saburo defies the pledge of obedience and is banished.

It's beautiful. It's Kurosawa's biggest, most expensive film. It's about nuclear war and how technology has only made killing easier. It's about Kurosawa's fear that he was old and obsolete. It's an adaptation which asks what sins Lear had to commit to become king. This is the only version of King Lear where Goneril is implied to be a kitsune. (Or, where Albany is a kitsune, however you want to look at it)

King Lear on a farm in rural Iowa. Larry Cook attempts to split up his acreage among his three daughters. Throughout the novel, various family secrets emerge, experienced from the point of view of Ginny, his eldest daughter.

the character work done on every single character... the slow quiet creeping emotion saturating the entire book... the way the plot of the original play is adapted so smoothly to this setting (in a way that’s just distanced enough from the original that it can be judged both As An Adaptation and As A Book Of Its Own Accord)… this book is so fucking good it made me cry in the metaphorical club

This book is so good and complex and compelling and actively willing to engage with themes of familial abuse and abuse of power. It actually deals with the three sisters as independent figures with different desires, needs, and opinions. The Edmund is introduced by describing his ass. There's an absolutely terrible movie with Jessica Lange. What more could you POSSIBLY want.

[angelunderheaven]

A Thousand Acres 1997

[shakespearenews]

JS: The big question in King Lear is: why are Goneril and Regan at such odds with their dad when Cordelia isn’t? And in that conflict, we’re supposed to sympathize with Lear. But when I was growing up and reading King Lear and then when I decided to write the book, what I wanted was for Goneril and Regan to get to express their ideas, opinions, and feelings. There’s a lot of soliloquies by Lear in the play, so he talks all the time.

But whatever Goneril and Regan did, I wanted to know why they did it and what they thought about it. So that was the point I was making when I was writing A Thousand Acres: that the women, the daughters, had their own point of view, and that their point of view was equally important as the father’s point of view. The other thing is that there had to be a reason that Goneril, and especially Regan, were so hostile toward their dad.It’s not up to the state to decide who gets to read what.

Shakespeare rewrote a lot of previous material, so when I was looking up the previous material that he used to write King Lear, there was some suggestion that the king had violated his daughters, which was not uncommon in those days. And so I thought that would be an interesting and believable motive for the way that Ginny and Rose feel about their father.

[escapeintothepages]

“The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.”

A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

[litsnaps]

[quotessentially]

From Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres

[andreabadgley]

I read this a few years ago and loved it. I gave it five stars, which I reserve for true excellence. I later found out it’s a retelling of King Lear. I didn’t know King Lear but wished I did after I learned that. Lately I’ve enjoyed two more works of fiction that reference King Lear — If We Were Villains and Station Eleven — so I watched the 2018 King Lear over the weekend and am now reading this again. I didn’t need to know anything about Lear to enjoy this the first time, but it does add a fun twist to know the story this time around.

[kdsmiththewriter]

#BookAdventCalendar2022 #Day 20 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is a modern-day retelling of King Lear. Never fear, if you've not read or seen King Lear you will still love the book! Patriarch Larry Cook decides to incorporate his 1000 acre farm and plans to give his three daughters ownership. One daughter is against it, so she is cut out. Dark secrets come out, resentments boil over, and the world as they knew it changes. It is a quietly brilliant work.

[mymiliblog]

November

2022.

[strangefable]

tfw an incomprehensible iceberg tip of an eldritch horror of fandom happenings floats across your dash, and you investigate and.... it's somehow worse than you could've possibly imagined

[hermitcraftx]

Why the FUCK are Southerners under the impression they're even welcomed on the internet ANYMORE????? Sorry but this is genuinely fucking rancid I feel fucking unsafe knowing that my spaces are being invaded by you fucking people. Fucking disgusting that it's 2024 and we can't hold piece of shit racists and Confederate nazis accountable for literal fucking war crimes and slavery anymore.

hey man. whats going on. this is such a weird thing to say to someone else on the internet life would be so beautiful if you stepped outside and talked to a real person for once. btw did you know the south is mostly full of poor people and black people and acting as if being from a place makes a person inherently a bigot is very weird almost as if it's pushing a classist narrative. Thats so wacky lol

[basingstokemercury]

That one time Adam seriously thought he could convince Ben to let him die rather than give up a comparatively small part of their land...

Really. You're supposed to be the insightful one.

[shakespearenews]

What was the scene that made you say “yes” to Julie Taymor’s film Titus, adapted from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus? The scene where she pleads for her son’s life. I thought, Okay, I understand that.

---

How about A Thousand Acres, the King Lear modernization, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jason Robards? There, I fell in love with the book it was based on. I had a production company then,Prairie Films, which also produced the 1992 TV-movie adaptation of O, Pioneers! co-starring Lange. and we optioned it along with Michelle’s company. The problem with that one was we didn’t have the right director. I don’t want to say who!Jocelyn Moorhouse. But that was a case where it should have been a much better film.

[escapeintothepages]

“Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.”

A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

[ratnurse]

We drove around the family property on the ute and saw dozens of emus

[triviareads]

Well, I gave Mary Sharma her second chance romance: