Snappy Advice From Classic Authors

Packed with frantic passion, psycho ardor, manipulation, betrayal, faux class and, of course, money, money, money, classic works of fiction offer advice galore–if  the reader knows the right questions to ask.

Timeless novels are more richly nuanced than television, more carefully plotted than films, and more reliable than mere celebrity-based self-help books.

Most readers already have a relationship to them, but they haven’t yet discovered how to make them into problem-solvers.

We can help.

Like “The Dummy’s Guides” series but for smart people—and based entirely on the writings of great authors while ignoring their usually rather dismal actual lives entirely so as not to muddy to literary waters—the books would be divided into categories.

These categories would include but not be limited to dating, education, weight loss, money management, leadership, friendship, family, childcare, creativity, aging, spirituality, sex, goal setting, employment, as well as—why not?—heaven and hell.

For example:

Jane Eyre can tell us about just which relationship problems are inevitable when you fall in love with your employer, and, for that matter, how to cope with your husband’s troubled ex-wife;

Madame Bovary would offer a much-needed perspective on a need for self-discipline and moderation, especially in terms of today’s consumer culture;

Henry James has a great deal of untapped wisdom to offer in terms of children and child rearing;

The Brothers Karamazov could help us face those pesky family-issues we’re dismissed for too long;

Simone DeBeauvoir might be called upon to give us a sense of perspective on weight loss and smoking;

Virginia Woolf would weigh in on education and literary competition;

Gone With The Wind would sit next to Suze Orman on the money-management shelf;

Moby Dick is a clear choice in terms of goal setting.

Or perhaps the books could be paired, with a male and female author offering different perspectives on the same topic: Jane Austen and Benjamin Franklin would advise us on affairs of the heart with older women, not to mention electricity, and how to conduct everything; Orwell and Colette could talk about leaving home and starting over in Paris and London; William Shakespeare and George Eliot could wrestle with the personal in the political and the political in the personal or discuss the beauty of women and whether it matters as much as the intelligence of men in making a suitable match; Jonathan Swift and Francois Rabelais could write a cookbook; Edgar Allen Poe and Vladimir Nabokov could team up and write a YA novel so genuinely frightening it would put the Twilight franchise out of business.

What titles would you like to propose? Which volumes would you like to edit?