Dangerous Liaisons & Other Adventures
Join these newly active literary subscriptions!
Dear Correspondants,
I haven’t had time to research a post this week. Instead, I’d like to turn your attention to several literary Substacks that have just begun new projects to add to your reading list alongside Dracula Daily and Edgar Allan Poe Daily.
Dangerous Liaisons Daily posts letters from the epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons on their in-universe dates. The book follows high society men and women of the 18th century through their scandalous marriage and seduction schemes. This novel was on the short list for Literary Letters, but the dates didn’t line up since I wanted to start as Dracula Daily was ending. So glad to see that another Curator has taken it up! So far, there have been four short letters over three days, so it should be easy to catch up. Also available in the original French. Content Warning for all kinds of sexual content and toxic relationships, including the grooming of a teenage girl.
The Public Domain Book Club reads a new public domain book, chapter by chapter, every month. This month it is Winnie the Pooh. Pooh’s adventures in the Hundred Acre Woods are extremely charming. There have only been two chapters posted so far. Each one tells a new story, so you could easily jump in at any point.
The Woman in White Daily delivers a weekly installment of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins’ engaging Victorian mystery novel. Each installment is the same as when they were originally published in Charles’ Dickens magazine All the Year Round. They are therefore quite long, but there’s only one to catch up on so far. I, for one, am already hooked.
The Case Files of Sheridan Bell is not a new project - in fact it is just wrapping up the first of a series of original fantasy mystery stories. It has quickly become one of my favorite subscriptions. I highly recommend joining in by catching up on the story so far or jumping in as the next story begins.
I’ve also been enjoying daily poetry at Dead Poets Daily. Join at any time to receive a poem every morning. It’s a lovely way to start the day.
If you have some extra reading time available, you could also catch up on Austen Weekly, which delivers a chapter of a different Jane Austen book each day of the week. You don’t have to read them all at once, but if you do, you start to feel that you are receiving updates from neighbors across the Victorian English countryside, each with their own intrigues and gossip.
Add in Dickens Weekly for a weekly dose of some pompous tomfoolery from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Although there have been some seven chapters already, each is only vaguely connected to the last, so you could get away with reading the first chapter by way of introduction, then skipping to the most recent installment.
Are there any active literary subscriptions I’ve missed? Or any you are particularly looking forward to? Let me know so I can join in too!
So glad you highlighted Sheridan Bell; I am having a blast following that one! I found a couple new ones to follow here as well, so thank you!