Books
There are over 40 canonical Oz books, including 14 by Baum, all of which are considered "official" sequels or prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In addition, the following books use the Oz milieu as settings for their tales:
- Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond is an upcoming 2013 anthology edited by Douglas Cohen & John Joseph Adams published by Amazon Publishing's 47North imprint.
- Home from Oz (Thomas Nelson, 1994) and The Oz Syndrome (Hillcrest Publishers, 2001) are two books penned by psychologist and professor, Dr.Michael A. O'Donnell which deal with the Oz characters and MGM musical version from a psychological point of view.
- Was is a 1992 parallel novel by Geoff Ryman focusing on the lives of disparate individuals linked to one another by the original novel and the 1939 film.
- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, which provides a backstory regarding Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West. Wicked has three sequels: Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008) and Out Of Oz (2011). Wicked is the most famous and popular parallel novel to Baum's original, although it bears a great deal of resemblance to the 1939 film. Wicked is also a Tony award winning stage musical 2003. The musical has been performed on Broadway (U.S), the West End (U.K) and in many other parts of the world. Some critics have stated that the musical version is a "watered down" interpretation of the novel.
- Dare is a 2007 novel by BET host Abiola Abrams, with several references to the tale of Oz. The main character's middle name is Gayle, which was Dorothy's last name, and she is on a journey to find love, courage and home. A record producer referred to as "the wizard" is named Ozzie Marvelous, and there is a "wicked witch" stylist and her "good" sister. The hotel Heretix is on a yellow bricked road and they leave Ohio in a tornado and land in beautiful sunshine the author refers to as Technicolor. There is also a frequent refrain that "no place was home."
- A Barnstormer in Oz is a 1982 novel by Philip José Farmer in which a pilot named Hank Stover, who is Dorothy's son, is transported to Oz when his plane becomes lost in a green cloud over Kansas.
- The Wizard of the Emerald City, a 1939 children's novel by Russian writer Alexander Melentyevich Volkov, is a loose translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was adapted into animated series (1976) and a live action film (1994). It has 5 sequels by the same author.
- The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein uses Oz as one of many alternate universe settings in which events take place, alongside alternate versions of the setting's Earth, Barsoom, and Lensmen settings, as well as other of Heinlein's own works' settings.
- Dorothy: The darker side of Oz, is a 2010 novel by Scott Stanford, offering a modern re-imagining of the classic tale. In this original story, keeping the essence of Baum's original, young Dorothy's enchanting journey takes her through a strange new land, as we see a sometimes beautiful, though often deadly, Oz.
Read more about this topic: Adaptations Of The Wizard Of Oz
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx’s Capital.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live...?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)