The Yorkshire Post interviews the singer and composer Suzanne Vega:
“I love books, I love reading,” she says. “I loved (Albert) Camus with The Stranger – that way of writing I love it, it’s very dramatic yet it’s very deadpan and I for a long time thought of that as the perfect book. I have loved Charlotte Brontë for Jane Eyre. I love Jane Eyre’s stoicism and her plainness, in her heart and soul she’s a dramatic person but in her life she’s kind of plain and stoic. I love Emily Brontë for Wuthering Heights for the exact opposite reason: she’s all drama in Wuthering Heights, which I love. (Duncan Seaman)
Arkansas Times interviews the new local chief education officer, Jennifer Glasgow:
Mary Ruth Taylor: Favorite Book?J.G.: Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”
News Letter announces the upcoming performance of the Heartbreak Theatre open-air Jane Eyre production in Armagh:
Heartbreak is delighted to present this original adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic, ‘Jane Eyre’, for the outdoor stage.The audience will follow everyone’s favourite Victorian heroine through her many ordeals, using the backdrop of a carnival, as she escapes from her aunt’s house, her school, the fire, the moors, and finally finds safety with her true love, Mr Rochester.Harrowing at times and heart-warming at others, this romantic tale is best enjoyed outdoors, with a picnic, of course.‘Jane Eyre’ will be staged on Wednesday July 20 at 6pm.Please note this event will take place outdoors at the Palace Garden, Palace Demesne, Armagh. The audience is encouraged to dress accordingly. (Julia-Ann Spence)
Let's open our Kate Bush (who is also Skiddle's artist of the month) section. The Guardian asks several music stars about Kate Bush and her music:
Sharon Van Etten: I was a late bloomer when it came to hearing Kate’s music. As a teenager I had moved to Tennessee and tried to do college but ended up coming back home to my parents with my tail between my legs. The first adult friend I made after moving back was a painter’s assistant named Alison, and she played me Wuthering Heights on a car ride through New Jersey. I hadn’t heard a melody that complex and in that high range before – or a song as exploratory in production and arrangement. The music Kate Bush makes is pretty genre-defying. Hearing her talk about Emily Brontë’s novel was something I’d never heard before, either; inserting herself into a story that wasn’t her own. I had never listened to music in such a literary way. (...)Brian Molko, Placebo: My first exposure to Kate Bush was the video for Babooshka when I was a preteen. I’d never seen anything like it: who is this person from outer space, singing an incredibly strange song? I was completely captivated by this beautiful woman who had such charisma and seemed so unique. Then I discovered that my older brother had [album] The Kick Inside, so I was introduced to The Man With the Child in His Eyes and Wuthering Heights. Then [in 1985] Hounds of Love came out and blew my mind completely. (...)Rae Morris: When I was about 14, my dad sat me down at a desktop PC and played me the video for Cloudbusting on YouTube. It was the first music video I’d seen that had a narrative and a famous actor, Donald Sutherland – it was like a movie. I wasn’t making music yet, but it definitely sparked something in my brain, like: “Oh wow, a female creator has had the vision for this.” Soon after, I went to HMV, bought a couple of records and slowly pieced together a history of her music. I felt as if I was catching up: I’ve always felt a deep jealousy that I wasn’t listening to the radio when Wuthering Heights first came out. (...)Mike Scott, the Waterboys: When Kate had her first hit with Wuthering Heights I felt as if we – the British public – had got an old soul back. It wasn’t just the resonance of the story, with Cathy returning at Heathcliff’s window; it was Kate, that voice, that character. (...)Hayden Thorpe, Wild Beasts: When I began performing in my late teens and early 20s, people said I sounded like a male Kate Bush. At the time I was quite offended by people saying I sounded a) like a woman, and b) like an artist I’d not heard of. But from there I decided to listen to her. I started at day one – The Kick Inside, Wuthering Heights era – and came to realise that what she created in that time was a form of expression unto itself. (Rachel Aroesti)
ABC Australia lists some renditions of Kate Bush's songs by classical musicians:
Wuthering Heights sung by soprano Emer BarryMany classically-trained sopranos have taken on the challenge of Wuthering Heights. Bush's most famous single, written when she was just eighteen, enacts the ghost of Katherine (sic) Earnshaw from Emily Brontë's titular novel.Wuthering Heights has an unsettling melody which gave the song its ghostly quality. The unpredictable intervals make the song sound quite off-key, but it takes some skill to hit the right pitch on the wily, windy moors. The range of the melody also necessitates most female singers use their head-voice, giving it the child-like quality so iconic of Kate Bush.In this 2018 performance in honour of Bush and Emily Brontë's birthdays, Irish soprano Emer Barry took the stage accompanied by an orchestra. (Ria Andriani)
Her Canberra invites you to the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in Canberra, which happens to be tomorrow, July 2, at the National Portrait Gallery:
If Kate Bush wasn’t already on your radar then I’m sure you’ve heard of her recently as she soared back up the charts thanks to Stranger Things, but you’ll be running up a hill to another of her hits at The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. Performing Kate Bush’s iconic interpretive dance and singing along to the Emily Brontë-inspired song, it is celebrating its sixth year of raising funds for Domestic Violence Crisis Service in the capital. Learn more about this chance to don your brightest red dress here.
The singer Natasha Hemmings talks about her tour with Ronan Keating in Sussex World:
The tour with Ronan is an important one for Natasha: “As a new artist, an emerging artist, people won't necessarily know my music so I'm having to think about the best way to describe myself, but I will also be doing some covers in between my original songs. I will do Enjoy The Silence and then I will do Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. I did that on the last tour and it was such a big hit with the audience which was great. I'm vocally in the same territory, and Kate Bush is someone that really inspired me. And I will also be doing a cover of Songbird.” (Phil Hewitt)
Caitlin Moran has something to say about this Kate Bush frenzy in The Times:
Given that “Kate Bush tribute acts” is now obviously a growth industry, might I suggest a couple of future projects that interested performers could work on? “Fake Bush” is the obvious starter. “Kate Butch” — like Kate Bush, but taken in a masc-lesbian direction. “Cape Bush” — all your fave Bush songs, but presented in a superhero stylee. And “Kate Bus” — the audience piles onto a double-decker, complete with “journey juice” (booze), and they drive around Bush’s home town of Bexleyheath while I sing Wuthering Heights at them.
Variety reviews Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ghost Song;
The album opens, heartbreakingly sweetly, with Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” — “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy! / I’ve come home, I’m so cold” — and ends with an equally affecting, graveyard-set original tune in which a ghost begs the living to please stop haunting them. It may be the first time this modern jazz great has been as emotional as she is virtuosic. (Chris Willman)
And finishing the Kate Bush interlude, La Nación (Argentina) talks about you know what and Anna Maz sings Wuthering Heights in the Brazilian TV contest Canta Comigo 4.
WA Today recommends the Sydney performances of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
Starring Tuuli Narkle (Black Is the New White) and Remy Hii (Crazy Rich Asians), the play is a modern interpretation of Anne Brontë’s classic of the same name. And when a show promises to take inspiration from both Fleabag and Pride and Prejudice, you know you’re in for a treat. (Anthony Segaert)
And Great British Life recommends the upcoming performances of SISATA's Wuthering Heights:
Dorset-based SISATA Theatre, bring a vibrant new adaptation of Emily Brontë's elemental masterpiece Wuthering Heights to various outdoor locations. Accompanied by beautifully haunting original live music, immerse yourself in a tempestuous story of love and obsession played out on a brooding windswept moor. (Helen Stiles)
Publishers Weekly announces some new YA books:
What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri. Feiwel and Friends, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-250-77350-0. In Suri’s retelling of this classic, Heathcliff clings to the last thread connecting him to his heritage and Catherine allows herself to be molded into the perfect society woman, until the two find one another and question if they can be together even if it means throwing away their secured futures.
Alice Elliott explains to the New York Times how she organises her books:
How do you organize your books?
I have one set of shelves for spiritual books in my bedroom. In my son’s former bedroom I have shelves for the books I rely on. They’re organized alphabetically except for the oversized books and sets by favorite authors such as Woolf, Didion, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Simpson, Gallant. Downstairs I have benches piled with TBR books. I have a shocking quantity of them, but so many books sound so good! I have two glass-door Ikea shelves in the dining room for poetry, gardening, childhood Bibles and prayer books and leftovers from my grandparents, including appealing editions of “Leaves of Grass” and “Jane Eyre," and novels I read as a child in their house and loved, such as “How Green Was My Valley,” by Richard Llewellyn, and “A Stone for Danny Fisher,” by Harold Robbins, which was the first book where I noticed a craft technique and suddenly realized that books are built of units. I wanted to do it!
John MacDonald in Financial Review has not a good opinion of Wuthering Heights 2011:
Great novels are notoriously hard to make into great movies, but directors keep trying. There have been plenty of notable disasters, such as Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) or Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012), which showed an understanding of the respective books that would have earned the filmmakers an “F” in a literary studies class.
Associated Press News is promoting the new film Mr. Malcolm's List:
Zawe Ashton had also always dreamed of playing a character in the novels she grew up loving, by Austen and Dickens and the Brontës. When another actor dropped out weeks before filming, Ashton was approached to play Julia Thistlewaite, the woman Mr. Malcolm’s rejects. She had about 24 hours to read the script, make a decision and fly to Ireland to quarantine for two weeks before cameras started to roll, but she was on board.“There are counterparts of mine out here who are suffering from bonnet fatigue because they’ve done so many period dramas,” Ashton said. “And so many of those dramas helped launch their careers at a very, very formative time. And I’m here thinking, ‘That’s so weird because I kind of feel like I could be Jane Eyre.’” (Lindsey Bahr)
Church Times reviews Widowland by C.J. Carey:
The leaders of the Alliance understand and fear the power of story and great literature. Rose’s job is to rewrite English classics such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice so that their message and content support the regime’s expectations of women as obedient, limited, and uneducated. She must remove any suggestion of female independence, intellect, and ideas, and make these central figures of literature as weak and dependent as women and girls are expected to be under the German Alliance.
RTBF (Belgium) interviews the musical duo GETCh and EJ Eyre:
Mais que signifient leurs noms de scène ?EJ Eyre s’appelle en réalité Emily Jane elle voulait garder son prénom comme nom de scène mais il existait déjà une Emily Jane, elle a donc gardé ses initiales. Passionnée de littérature et de féminisme, elle a choisi d’ajouter Eyre à la suite pour Jane Eyre une héroïne fantastique du roman éponyme de Charlotte Brontë. C’était une des premières héroïnes de la littérature à l’époque. Du côté de GETCH, l’histoire est simple, il s’appelle Gaëtano mais tout le monde l’appelle Getch. (Philomène Parmentiere) (Translation
Postal (Portugal) asks what's the point of imagination:
Um dos paracosmos mais conhecidos, Gondal, nasceu do tédio das irmãs Brontë, Emily (autora de “Wuthering Heights”) e Charlotte (autora de “Jane Eyre”). Os primeiros contornos desta saga surgem na juventude, com a chegada de uma caixa de pequenos soldados de brinquedo, mas pensa-se que o jogo terá continuado por mais de duas décadas. (David Guedes) (Translation)
NRK (Norway) asks several literary critics about their summer readings:
Anne Cathrine Straume
«Jane Eyre» av Charlotte Brontë
Har aldri lest den, det er en stor forsømmelse. Håper å få med meg den kritikerroste teateroppsetningen på Nationaltheatret til høsten. (Translation)
Good Housekeeping lists 'engagement quotes', including one by Emily Brontë. The Brontë Babe Blog presents a new edition of The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories, edited by the Brontë Babe herself, Nicola Friar.
