Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416934448 ISBN 13: 9781416934448

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2007

Synopsis

No one captured the teen portion of the eighties as poignantly as writer-director John Hughes. Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful are timeless tales of love, angst, longing, and self-discovery that illuminated and assuaged the anxieties of an entire generation.

Fondly nostalgic, filled with wit and surprising insights, don't you forget about me contains original essays from a skillfully chosen crop of novelists and essayists on the films' far-reaching effects on their own lives -- an irresistible read for anyone who came of age in the eighties (or just wishes they did).

Featuring new writing from:
Steve Almond * Julianna Baggott * Lisa Borders * Ryan Boudinot * T Cooper * Quinn Dalton * Emily Franklin * Lisa Gabriele * Tod Goldberg * Nina de Gramont * Tara Ison * Allison Lynn * John McNally * Dan Pope * Lewis Robinson * Ben Schrank * Elizabeth Searle * Mary Sullivan * Rebecca Wolff * Moon Unit Zappa

About this title

About the Author

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We're So Famous, Vernon Downs, World Gone Water and Garden Lakes; editor of the anthologies Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (with Mary Cotton) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Reviews

The angst-ridden films of John Hughes remain vital viewing to a generation of writers old enough to have seen The Breakfast Club in theaters, and this collection of musings from 20 such contributors could be too much of a good thing for even die-hard Hughes fans. Standouts include Steve Almond's essay about his late-blooming infatuation with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Ryan Boudinot's dissection of Weird Science (it's "a masturbation fantasy for boys who haven't yet figured out how to masturbate"). Most contributors, however, approach the same films (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Bueller) from similar, fawning perspectives, and the unfortunate result is a pile-up of overthought but underdeveloped essays with an ironic high school term paper sensibility. Elizabeth Searle, for example, pens a lengthy discourse about Molly Ringwald's scream in Sixteen Candles, and Mary Sullivan likens practically any Hughes film to Cinderella. Readers who, like the contributors, feel indebted to Hughes for enlightening their adolescence, may want to pick this up and spot read it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416934448
• ISBN 13: 9781416934448
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Clarke Jaime