Hannibal Lecter has appeared in four books and five film adaptations to date, and, with each installment of his saga, he's spun farther along the unlikely trajectory from serial killer to ladies' man. A supporting character in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, he graduated to main character status in The Silence of the Lambs, where he simultaneously beguiled and repulsed FBI trainee Clarice Starling, only to finally win her hand in Hannibal, which ended with the pair canoodling in Buenos Aires. (The subsequent film adaptation stopped short of this ending, but still presented Hannibal and Clarice as thwarted lovers.) Reviewing the novel for Talk (oh, 1999!), Martin Amis described the [...]

A nine-foot-tall statue of Sherlock Holmes stands outside the Marylebone exit to the Baker Street Tube station in London. Solemn and gaunt, Holmes looms over traffic in his trademark Inverness cape and deerstalker, pipe in hand. The statue, London’s first to its famous fictional denizen, was unveiled in 1999. It was primarily funded by the Abbey National Building Society, formerly of 219-229 Baker Street, which, starting in 1932, began receiving the thousands of letters mailed each year to Sherlock Holmes at his 221B Baker Street address. At one point, the society employed a full-time secretary to answer them. When in 1990, the Sherlock Holmes museum down the street (in [...]

Four years after the publication of the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and on the day of that film's debut, Harry and all his friends—not to mention his enemies, minor acquaintances and a few of his forebears—are still leading extremely active lives online in the form of fan-made fiction and inspired media. The series has long enjoyed one of the biggest, most productive and considerably vocal fandoms on the Internet, not surprising as its publication coincided with the wider blossoming of the web.

Of course, plenty of analysis has already been recorded academically, anthropologically and pop-culturally about the phenomenon of fandom and fan-created communities. [...]