Vampires, pranks and podcasts: here are some ideas to reboot 2025’s public domain books.
The new year means new calendars you’ll stop using in a month, new resolutions you’ll break in a week, and new public domain works you can remix and ruin all year long. And in 2025, a lot of classics are escaping the shackles of copyright — Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a great list and a thorough explainer on the law, if you want to dig a little deeper.
Some of these dusty 1929 books are just crying out for an exciting reboot for today’s fickle audiences. Here are a few ideas — and Hollywood? I’m waiting by the phone.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s first best-seller has all the big Ernie tropes: spare style, courageous and conflicted men, and beautiful and tragic and tragically beautiful women. The novel follows an ambulance driver working on the Italian Front in WWI, as he grapples with war, God, and his love affair with a British nurse. Pretty standard stuff, I think we can do better.
Any of the women in this book would be excellent characters for an Ahab’s Wife or Wide Sargasso Sea treatment, or could serve as the emotional center of a quiet, introspective novel where the nurse, Catherine, survives the war and her American lover, to live at the foot of the Swiss Alps with her child.
But this could also go in a louder, more marketable direction: Catherine, sick of following around this perpetually wounded Hemingway stand-in, ditches him. Years later, she sees the same masculine tendencies exploding around her in Fascist Italy, and starts an antifascist group to resist Mussolini and his goons. I’m imagining a lot of cool biplane and train chase sequences taking visual cues from the Italian Futurists.
Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley
I would love to see an American Vandal style parody show satirizing cult documentaries, set in Crowley’s Thelema scene. Crowley’s self-seriousness makes for excellent comedy — the spelling “magick” alone is very funny.
RIP Aleister, wish you had lived long enough to experience Hot Topic.
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
A lot of great horror has been made by upturning the conventions of predominantly white, Southern stories and physically manifesting America’s worst sins in terrifying ways. Faulkner is perfect for this treatment — and you could definitely throw some vampires in there on top of the Compson’s financial and social collapse.
But I think what’s interesting to me about doing a horror Sound and the Fury is its form: the book’s stream-of-consciousness style would make for a great spooky audio project. Getting inside someone’s head through a manic monologue while they’re running around trying avoid getting blood-drained by some Southern Nosferatu? I’m listening.
Plus I know Hollywood will be into the franchise potential of a Yoknapatawpha County Cinematic Universe.
Popeye by E. C. Segar
An exact remake of HBO’s Girls, but Adam Driver’s character is Popeye played by Adam Driver.
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Red Harvest is one of my favorite of Hammett’s book, and I think it’s ripe for a reimagining. My understanding is that the book was inspired by real life IWW miners strikes and reprisals, and I would love to see the radical labor plot-lines put a little more front and center; Red Harvest’s main gumshoe, cynical and completely off-the-leash, is due for some comeuppance. Or maybe he renounces the Pinkertons after discovering a sense of solidarity and class awareness.
And hey, toss some vampires and wolfmans in there too — people love that stuff.
Encyclopædia Britannica (14th edition)
The 14th edition had a murder’s row of contributors, which makes me think that an anthology show inspired by the entry writers and their subjects could make for an interesting series, or a wide-ranging novel like Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World.
But that’s not going to work for the TikTok set, so what about a prank show optimized for bite-sized social media clips: Every week, Encycl-Oh No-pedia Brat-annica takes an entry from the 14th edition as inspiration for a wacky prank. For the “Interferometer” episode, someone giving a presentation at work gets a bunch of laser pointers shined on them. For the “Diving, Deep Sea” episode, a family is tricked into thinking that they’re seeing real mermaids, but on closer inspection, they’re just D-List celebrities with fins. And it goes without saying that the “Harmonic Analysis” prank writes itself.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
A subtle rumination on a woman’s role and limitations in a society that seeks to stifle them? Sorry, but that’s just not getting butts in seats. We gotta jazz this up.
How about Law & Order: Room Of One’s Own Unit, a procedural about a female detective who is able to solve crimes by entering into a special room where she becomes clairvoyant. Her hard-nosed boss just doesn’t understand her, leading to a will-they-won’t-they situation, and maybe in later seasons it could be revealed that he’s a vampire.
The original German version of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
This book is just crying out to be rebooted as an advice podcast.
Sexton’s work will enter the public domain in countries with copyright of “life plus 50 years” this year, meaning her powerful and complex work can be made even more powerful and complex:
So it has come to this –
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine
like a frog following
a sundial yet having an electric
seizure at the quarter hour.
It’s also when
the vampires come out,
yeepers creepers!
