Tolstoy will do the robot in the next Quirk Classic

Quirk Books, the folks who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, its prequel, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, have moved on from bloodying the frock of Jane Austen and set their sights on a new author: Leo Tolstoy. No, the company’s fourth augmented classic isn’t going to be War and Pieces of Brain, nor will it be The Undeath of Ivan Ilyich.

It’s Android Karenina, which will transpose the tale of Anna Karenina to a steampunk-inspired alternate 19th-century world of cyborgs, robot butlers, and space travel. S&S&S scribe Ben H. Winters will be helping to mechanize the original text, and the new quirkified version (the cover, at left, has yet to be designed) is set for release in bookstores this June.

I think these changes can only make a tragic tale more tragic; poor Anna never did well with steam-powered locomotion, and now she’s surrounded by it. No word on whether she’ll be bionically rebuilt following the ending, though. It’s good that this series is branching out to other authors, even if Tolstoy doesn’t exactly inspire the same Sunday-reading-group fervor as Ms. Austen. What say you, Shelf-Lifers? Do you like your Russian literature automatized?