'Hop-Frog': 'Game Of Thrones' Actor Peter Dinklage To Appear In Film Based On Edgar Allan Poe's Short Story

As May as been designated Short Story Month, it was good to read screendaily.com and discover that Game of Thrones standout actor Peter Dinkage will appear in a film based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story Hop-Frog.

Peter Dinklage, riding high on the global success of Game Of Thrones, has signed on to star in Hop Frog.

The film is based on the Edgar Allan Poe revenge story about a puppeteer who poses as a court jester to exact revenge on the knights who murdered his uncle and kidnapped the woman he loves.

Mark Palansky, who last directed Penelope, will direct from a screenplay by newcomer Brian Alan Carr.

“Hop Frog is beautiful and vicious,” said Dinklage. “It has haunted me ever since I read Poe’s original tale of revenge years ago. I can think of no other director than Mark Palansky to bring this new imagining of it vibrantly to life.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/dinklage-to-star-in-hop-frog/5056462.article?blocktitle=Latest-News&contentID=1846

You can read Poe's short story Hop-Frog online via the below link:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/525/ 

You can also read an earlier post on Short Story Month via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/05/may-is-national-short-story-month.html

Otto Penzler On Why The Best Mysteries Are Written In English

 

Otto Penzler, editor and propuietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, offers his view in Publishers Weekly that the best mysteries are written in English.

It is an inarguable fact that virtually everything of interest and significance in the history of detective fiction has been written in the English language, mainly by American and English authors.

This is not chauvinistic, racist, insular, or opinionated; it is merely reportage.

The reason for this is quite simple. For detectives of fiction to succeed as the heroes of stories, there must be real-life detectives from whose exploits may be drawn fictional narratives. These flesh and blood prototypes can exist only in a free democratic society, with which too few countries were blessed in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. England, thanks to Magna Carta, and America, thanks to its Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution, bestowed the gift of liberty to its citizens, as did France, among countries with enough wealth and literacy to encourage and reward the production of books.

In totalitarian states, including most monarchies, the police force, often a national militia, supported the ruler, controlled the population, and forced it to his (usually) will. Citizens would do practically anything to avoid the eye or reach of the officers of the law, who were the greatest threat to the average person’s freedom and property and therefore the last place they would go for help. As a result, it would have been virtually impossible for an author to establish a heroic protagonist in the image of one of these enforcers of the ruler’s dictates.      

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53831-why-the-best-mysteries-are-written-in-english.html 

Grip, The Raven Who Inspired Dickens and Poe, Is Stuffed And Stored At The Philadelphia Free Library

Phillymag.com offers an interesting piece about how Charles Dickens' pet raven, called Grip, was the inspiration for the raven in Dicken's novel Barnaby Rudge, and later served to inspire Edgar Allen Poe when he wrote The Raven in Philadelphia.

Grip, the raven who influenced two of the 19th Century's greatest authors, is now stuffed and on displayed at the Philadelphia Free Library.

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2011/10/31/poes-raven-stuffed-free-library/