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Tag: Jane Austen

  • THP’s 2025 Holiday Book Gift Guide

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    December really snuck up on us this year, but we at THP are not letting the holidays slip by without giving you our second annual book gift guide! Here’s to another year of incredible book releases and recommendations.

    If you know a fellow book lover like us, these boxed sets and holiday-themed books are the perfect gift. Once you have your cart filled, then get ready for our end-of-year book roundups, which we’ll be dropping very soon!

    Content warning: The Honey POP encourages mindful reading and checking the author’s website for content warnings.

    Jane Austen Gift Set

    Image Source: Penguin Random House

    She’s an icon, she’s a legend, and she’s put together into a lovely gift set just in time for the holidays. If you know a classic lit lover or any fan of Jane Austen (guilty!), then this three-book collection is perfect. It features the books Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. In case you haven’t heard, we’re celebrating more than the holidays this year—we’re celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen’s timeless novels!

    Order the Jane Austen gift set here!

    An Ember In The Ashes Box Set

    An Ember in the Ashes series
    Image Source: Penguin Random House

    If you love epic fantasy series as much as we do, then take a look at the complete box set for An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. This edition features all four books in the series: An Ember in the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm. We all know at least one person who’s been putting off reading this series until now. And this box set is sure to convince them to pick it up!

    Order the An Ember in the Ashes box set here!

    TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SABAA TAHIR:
    FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE

    Mint To Be By Katie Cicatelli-Kuc

    Mint to Be by Katie Cicatelli-Kuc
    Image Source: Scholastic

    The next recommendation on our holiday book gift guide is Mint to Be by Katie Cicatelli-Kuc! It’s a cozy winter romance with a special scratch & sniff cover that will have you feeling festive all the way into the new year. It follows Emma Sherman, who’s returning to her hometown for the holidays. She left for school in New York City without saying goodbye to her best friend Aiden. And Aiden never got the chance to confess his feelings before Emma left…

    Release date:
    Order Mint to Be here!

    TO LEARN MORE ABOUT KATIE CITATELLI-KUC:
    INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE

    A Hogwarts Christmas: An Official Harry Potter Coloring Book

    A Hogwarts Christmas Coloring Book
    Image Source: Scholastic

    We wouldn’t be in the holiday spirit without a themed coloring book! The Harry Potter series have become a staple to our holiday traditions. A Hogwarts Christmas by Dizzy Devil Designs calls to our inner child and features some of the most iconic winter and Christmas scenes. For all us Potterheads and coloring fanatics out there, we can think of nothing better to do while on our annual marathon of all eight movies!

    Order the A Hogwarts Christmas coloring book here!

    Sunrise On The Reaping: Collectors’ Gift Edition

    Sunrise on the Reaping Gift Edition
    Image Source: Scholastic

    The bad news: we still have a year until the next Hunger Games movie comes out. The good news: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins is getting a gorgeous collector’s edition to tide us over. We all know dystopian fiction has been making the ultimate comeback. So on behalf of all the dystopian readers in your life, you don’t want to pass up on this gift edition with new cover art, stained edges, and more!

    Order the Sunrise on the Reaping: Collectors’ Gift Edition here!

    TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SUZANNE COLLINS:
    WEBSITE

    How did you like our 2025 book gift guide? Do any of these books and box sets speak out to you? Which ones are you giving your favorite bookworm this year? Let us know on Twitter! You can also find us over on Facebook and Instagram!

    Want to hear some of our audiobook recommendations? Here’s the latest!

    Need some more book recs? We got them!

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    Julie Dam

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  • Best Bets: Houston Greek Film Festival, Birdy, and A Little Night Music – Houston Press

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    It’s National ‘Have a Bad Day’ Day, so be sure to wish your loved ones the worst as you head out the door to check out our best bets. This week, we have the return of a popular film festival, a deep dive into the life of a pioneering political figure, and quite possibly “the finest American play ever written,” according to Edward Albee. Keep reading for these and more.   

    Writer-director Antonis Tsonis has described his 2024 film Brando With a Glass Eye, about a method actor who attempts armed robbery to make his dream of studying in New York come true, as “layered like a babushka doll with meta-narratives,” acknowledging it’s “bold, risky, maybe even strange.”  The film will open the Houston Greek Film Festival at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, at the MATCH, marking the start of a weekend featuring ten films and almost a dozen shorts. The lineup includes 14 Gulf Coast premieres, three U.S. premieres, and one world premiere. Tickets to the individual screenings are available for $15, with a $30 reception-only ticket available, along with a 5-ticket pass for $60, and a VIP all-access pass for $90. The full schedule can be found here, and tickets can be purchased here.

    The story of Barbara Jordan, Texas’ first Black state senator and the first Southern Black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, began right here, in Houston’s Fifth Ward. On Friday, November 21, at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, you can learn more about the pioneer in Angela Lynn Tucker’s documentary The Inquisitor, named for the moniker Jordan earned for her questioning as a member of the House Judiciary Committee during President Richard Nixon’s 1974 Watergate hearings. Stay after the film for a discussion with special guests, including Tucker. Two additional screenings are scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday, November 22, and 2 p.m. Sunday, November 23. Tickets to any of the screenings can be purchased here for $7 to $9.

    Contemporary dance, martial arts and tai chi, and Peking opera (the symbolic, stylized, and traditional Chinese performing art) come together in Lai Hung-Chung’s Birdy, a work set to electronic and Chinese classical music that will be performed by Hung Dance at the Wortham Theater Center on Friday, November 21, at 7:30 p.m. Lai founded the Taiwanese contemporary dance company, which is named for the Chinese word meaning “soar” – a theme that will also be at play in Birdy – in 2017, and Performing Arts Houston is bringing the ensemble to town as part of the Tudor Family Dance Series to make its Houston debut with the piece. Birdy will be performed a second time on Saturday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets to either performance are available here for $44.85 to $79.35.

    Visit Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, circa 1901 to 1913, to spend time with the Gibbs and Webb families in Thornton Wilder’s classic 1938 play Our Town, which 4th Wall Theatre Company will open at Spring Street Studios at Friday, November 21, at 7:30 p.m. Skyler Sinclair, who plays Emily Webb in the production, told the Houston Press the play is “almost like a magic trick,” saying that Wilder “lays everything out so beautifully,” resulting in a story that is “universal” and “transcends time.” Sinclair added that, “This play has a message that every human being needs to hear…It asks the audience if you could put a price on your most basic memory of life, what would that be.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays through December 20. Tickets are available here for $40 to $70.

    YouTube video

    Taiwanese twin brothers and percussionists Jen-Ting and Jen-Yu Chien, known as Twincussion, will end their U.S. concert tour at Asia Society Texas Center on Friday, November 21, at 7:30 p.m. with Twincussion: ‘Twin Beats’ — Melodies and Rhythms From Taiwan. During the program, presented in partnership with Taiwan Academy, the instrumentalists will play a program that includes new arrangements of Taiwanese folk melodies, such as  “Dark Sky (Tian Hei Hei)” and “Longing for the Spring Breeze (Wang Chun Feng)”; a Taipei-flavored take on Wayne Siegel’s 42nd Street Rondo; George Frideric Handel’s Passacaglia, arranged by Johan Halvorsen; Tomasz GoliÅ„ski’s Layered Elements, a piece commissioned by the brothers and premiered in 2018; and more. Tickets can be purchased here for $10 to $30.

    Director Hal Prince famously described A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, as “whipped cream with knives.” The Sweden-set musical, a romantic farce revolving around a pair of couples, premiered in 1973 and went on to win multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical – as well as spawn the hit song “Send In the Clowns,” performed since by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Grace Jones – and on Friday, November 21, at 7:30 p.m., you can see it when Opera in the Heights opens a production of the show at Lambert Hall. A Little Night Music will also be performed at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 22, and 2 p.m. Sunday, November 23. Tickets are available here for $35 to $85.

    In Beautiful Princess Disorder, playwright Kathy Ng’s script specifies the play’s main character, Triangle Person, “to be wearing a very geometric, triangle-shaped head and a no-nonsense navy blue swimsuit” as they wait in “the parking lot of heaven” with other inhabitants – specifically, Mother Teresa and Tilikum, the orca with three fatalities to his name featured in the 2013 documentary Blackfish. You can meet these curious characters on Friday, November 21, at 8 p.m., when The Catastrophic Theatre world premieres Ng’s 75-minute, one-act at the MATCH. Additional performances of the play are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Monday, December 1; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; and 2:30 p.m. Sundays through December 13. Tickets are pay-what-you-can with a suggested price of $40 and can be purchased here.

    Clara Marsh and Lindsay Ehrhardt in Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley.
    Clara Marsh as Kitty and Lindsay Ehrhardt as Georgiana in Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley. Credit: Pin Lim, Forest Photography

    Step into the world of Jane Austen on Saturday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m., when Main Street Theater brings its holiday Pemberley play tradition back to the stage with the opening night of Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley. Elizabeth Bennet’s sister, Kitty, and Mr. Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, share the spotlight in the “comedy of manners,” the third installment of Gunderson and Melcon’s Christmas at Pemberley series. Following Main Street’s 2023 production of the play, the Houston Press noted “few plays blend the antique with the new with such finesse, delicate touch, and laugh-out-loud repartee.” Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and November 26, and 3 p.m. Sundays through December 21 (with no performance on Thanksgiving Day). Tickets can be purchased here for $45 to $64.

    This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.

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    Natalie de la Garza

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  • Acclaimed Hugh Grant Movie Gets Theatrical Rerelease for 30th Anniversary

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    Sony Pictures has announced the Sense and Sensibility theatrical release date for the upcoming special screening of the classic romance period drama based on Jane Austen’s iconic 1811 novel of the same name. It was led by Academy Award winners Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, along with Golden Globe winners Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Since its debut in 1995, the movie has maintained its near-perfect Tomatometer rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 67 reviews.

    “The film tells the story of the Dashwood sisters: pragmatic Elinor and passionate Marianne. When their father dies unexpectedly, his estate must pass by law to his son from his first marriage, leaving Mr. Dashwood’s current wife and daughters without a home and with barely enough money to live on,” reads the official synopsis. “As both sisters struggle to find romantic fulfillment in a society obsessed with financial and social status, Elinor with shy, charming Edward, and Marianne with either the dashing Willoughby or the haunted Colonel Brandon, they must learn to mix sense with sensibility in their dealings with both money and men.

    When is the rerelease date for Hugh Grant’s Sense and Sensibility movie?

    In celebration of its 30th anniversary and Austen’s 250th birthday, Sense and Sensibility is officially returning to select theaters in 4K for a limited engagement in North America on December 14, December 16, and December 17. In addition to its critical success, the movie was also a box office hit. During its original theatrical run, it earned a worldwide gross of $135 million against a reported budget of around $16 million.

    The movie adaptation was directed by acclaimed filmmaker Ang Lee, with Thompson writing the screenplay. The ensemble cast also included Greg Wise as John Willoughby, Gemma Jones as Mrs. Dashwood, Harriet Walter as Fanny Dashwood, James Fleet as John Dashwood, Imogen Stubbs as Lucy Steele, Hugh Laurie as Mr. Palmer, Imelda Staunton as Charlotte Palmer, and more. It was produced by Lindsay Doran, with Sydney Pollack serving as an executive producer.

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    Maggie Dela Paz

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  • Nine Artists Not to Miss at 1-54 London

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    Hervé Yamguen

    The sculptures of Cameroonian artist Hervé Yamguen embody metamorphosis. First, by transforming material, bending bronze into unique three-dimensional creations, and second, by exploring the realm of human and non-human forms in his works. Several sculptures from his series “Nous sommes nature” (“We are nature”) are whimsical and strange at the same time. In one, a small framed body, presumably of a boy, rests on the ground. From it grows and emerges bird-like animals, figureheads and plants. Another spiral-shaped sculpture emulates a Tower of Babel with vines coiling all around. Here also, mask-like heads poke through, suggesting the presence of spirits and the intertwined nature of being.

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    Farah Abdessamad

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  • Emma Thompson Produces Her Own Career Nightmare In ‘Dead of Winter’

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    Emma Thompson braves the frozen wilderness in “Dead of Winter,” a hackneyed horror film that traps the Oscar winner in subzero temperatures and an equally chilling screenplay. Courtesy of Vertical

    Like almost every other actor of renown in today’s diminished world of second-rate movies, Emma Thompson is forced to face the challenge of inventing her own projects to keep her film career alive. This now includes starring in a hackneyed, uninspired dime-a-dozen horror film called Dead of Winter. She also produced it herself. Times are bad all over.

    DEAD OF WINTER ★★ (2/4 stars)
    Directed by: Brian Kirk
    Written by: Nicholas Jacobson-Larson & Dalton Leeb
    Starring: Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Marc Menchaca, Gaia Wise, Cuan Hosty-Blaney, Dalton Leeb, Paul Hamilton, Lloyd Hutchinson & Brian F. O’Byrne
    Running time: 97 mins.

    In this waste of a great actor’s talent and intelligence, she plays an aging, gun-toting hag unwisely revisiting an old fishing hole her late husband loved to spread his ashes. On a snowy road in the frozen wastes of northern Minnesota, her truck breaks down in a storm and when she hikes through drifts of ice up to her eyeballs seeking warmth and shelter in an abandoned shack in the wilderness, she finds a young kidnap victim handcuffed to a frozen basement pipe by a pair of married of demented killers (Judy Greer, especially menacing as the wacko wife) for reasons that are never convincingly explained. The movie is about the old woman’s futile efforts to save the girl from an endless series of assaults and tortures, narrowly escaping near death at every turn. It’s a preposterous story to follow, but thanks to the expertise of Emma Thompson, it keeps you interested.

    Shot, slashed, bleeding, and half frozen to death, she copes remarkably well, fortified by memories of her happy marriage and her ability to keep a fire going in a deserted cabin, medicate her gunshot wounds and sew the pieces of her arm together (“Just like sewing a quilt,” she quips through the pain.) The white backdrop of constant snow and zero temperatures also add to the intensity of the winter ambience with enough discomfort that your teeth will chatter just looking at it. The movie is a far cry from the star’s collection of elegant Jane Austen period pieces, but Ms. Thompson is always worth watching, even when she’s wasting her time—and ours.

    Unfortunately, the sloppy screenplay by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb asks more questions than it answers, deriving most of its style from Fargo. Knowing the territory, why did Ms. Thonpson’s character choose the Midwest’s worst season to spread ashes from a dilapidated truck not safe to drive, even in the best weather? What did the kidnap victim do to get captured? Where are the vicious kidnappers going, and why? Director Brian Kirk does nothing to explain, elaborate or justify. Worse still, the two lunatic villains are identified as fentanyl addicts, but that doesn’t explain why the female half of the team goes through most of the movie with as many as five hypodermic needles at a time lodged in her tongue.

    What attracted such a fine actress as Emma Thompson to so much carnage in the first place is anybody’s guess. According to the end credits, Dead of Winter is set in Minnesota but filmed on location in Finland, Germany and Belgium, when all it takes is one snow-covered backyard in New Jersey.

    Emma Thompson Produces Her Own Career Nightmare In ‘Dead of Winter’

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    Rex Reed

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  • “Snow on the Beach,” Climate Change Child’s Play, Doesn’t Provide the Best Simile For Evoking the “Unusual” Phenomenon of Falling in Requited Love

    “Snow on the Beach,” Climate Change Child’s Play, Doesn’t Provide the Best Simile For Evoking the “Unusual” Phenomenon of Falling in Requited Love

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    Even when “Snow on the Beach” was “first” released on the first iteration of Taylor Swift’s Midnights, “all the way back” in October of 2022, it was already a stretch to liken something “weird” (i.e., falling in requited love with someone) to snow falling on the beach. Because if the past several years should have taught people—even those in a protective bubble like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey—anything, it’s that formerly “absurd” weather phenomena are now to be the norm (along with arbitrarily unleashed novel viruses). Nay, they are the norm. And, although some wouldn’t expect it, it is, in fact, rising temperatures that can eventually result in extremely cold weather scenarios. More specifically, “Ice Age” weather scenarios.

    Take, for example, the “cold blob” of water that has come to roost in the area south of Greenland. Its origins are a result of melting glaciers—melting ever more rapidly as we keep ordering our useless shit from the internet. And yet, despite the scalding temperatures that are visiting Earth at present, the effect those temperatures have on “water blobs” like the one south of Greenland influence the flow of the Gulf Stream, which is responsible for “ferrying” warm water to the north. If that flow is compromised enough, the litany of consequences could include, but are not limited to, a steep drop in temperatures throughout Europe, rising sea levels on the East Coast and more ferocious, unpredictable hurricanes. And that’s just on the Atlantic side of things. The Pacific has its own barrage of ticking time bombs.

    The bottom line, of course, is that seeing snow on the beach would hardly be “surprising” or “unusual” in an Ice Age kind of setting. Or just a post-climate apocalypse one. A “setting” that Swift herself is arguably more responsible for than Del Rey, with the former being an avid private jet user and the latter being just a garden-variety lover of casual joy riding in her car (#justride). Nonetheless, they relish singing, in “angelic” voices on the newest edition of the song (featuring “More Lana”) from Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition), “Are we falling like snow at the beach/Weird but fuckin’ beautiful?” To be clear, it’s neither that weird nor is it especially “beautiful,” so much as utterly unsettling and chilling (no pun intended).

    Yet the eeriness of such a sight is taken as an opportunity for Swift and Del Rey to try their hand at some overly wistful and romantic Jane Austen shit. Austen, however, gets a pass for being so maudlin about falling in love because she lived in an era where climate change was nary a thought in one’s mind (despite the fact that she witnessed the height of the British Industrial Revolution). She could afford to be “chimerical.” Technically, so can Swift and Del Rey, who comprise the echelons of wealth that will be able to, in some form or other, shield themselves from the climate change fallout (perhaps with an actual fallout shelter).

    With Del Rey being given the opportunity on the new version of “Snow on the Beach” to sing a full verse, she croons, “This scene feels like what I once saw on a screen/I searched ‘aurora borealis green.’” This, too, brings up the fact that even the Northern Lights aren’t immune to the taint of climate change either. Like the stars in the sky dimming as a result of light pollution, aurora borealis will suffer from its own dimming—but, in this case, due to alterations in cloud formations that will inevitably obscure the brilliance of the lights. So yes, Del Rey will actually need to search on a screen for the kind of erstwhile “aurora borealis green” she’s looking for.

    Barring climate change as a reason for snow on the beach, there’s also the consideration of how many beaches already do offer up snowy tableaus regularly. For example, Kings Beach in Tahoe, Chatham Lighthouse Beach in Cape Cod, Unstad Beach on Norway’s Lofoten Islands (where you can see aurora borealis), Sopot Beach in Sopot, Poland and Loch Morlich Beach in the Scottish Highlands. Then you have the beach that made snow on the beach truly famous: the one in Montauk where a large portion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place. And perhaps Swift got her inspiration from this very movie, what with Joel and Clementine starting to fall back in love on the now snow-dappled beach they initially met on.

    And yet, snow is just as liable to become part of “the new normal” (that hideous phrase people like to use to “normalize” the long-forewarned effects of capitalism) in places perennially associated with “nothing but sunshine.” Case in point, one beach that wasn’t accustomed to getting snow until recent years is Torre Lapillo in Puglia. The unlikely snowfall that occurred there in 2017 dredged up a five-hundred-year-old prophecy from Matteo Tafuri that stated two days of snowfall in Salento would be part of heralding the apocalypse. The snow came again in 2019. So surely, we’re that much closer. If not to the kind of apocalypse that signals a bang so much as a whimper, then at least the kind that standardizes snow on the beach to a point where Tay and LDR’s simile becomes increasingly less meaningful.

    As for Wallace S. Broecker, the preeminent scientist who made the term “global warming” take off in the 70s (before Dick Cheney decided that sounded too “icky” and made “climate change” the phrase instead), he’s likely not hearing the song from beyond the grave with much glee. After all, he had urged the world, before his death in 2019, to take far more drastic measures to avoid the “many more surprises in the greenhouse” to come. Trying to make snow on the beach seem like something “abnormal” while we’re already living in a climate change scenario certainly isn’t going to help with that.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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