'Price and Prejudice and Zombies' team tackles Tolstoy

Quirk Books, the creators of
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death with their next mashup tale.
Android Karenina, due out June 8, apparently sets
Anna Karenina in a "steampunk-inspired world" of robotic butlers and ultra-human cyborgs.

The Quirk Classics series, thought up by editor Jason Rekulak, combines "popular fanboy characters like ninjas, pirates, zombies and monkeys" with classic public domain book titles. The Tolstoy title will be co-authored by Ben H. Winters, who wrote the team's 2009 book Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

More from the publishers about the new title: "As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology - and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen."

Quirk Books' first title, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, is a mashup of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice and elements of modern zombie fiction. The book made US and UK bestseller lists and is now being made into a film starring Natalie Portman. A prequel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith, is due out on March 30.