S&m, E L James | featured news

Every day brings news of more and more projects hanging onto Fifty Shades of Grey‘s coattails (or cat o’nine tails). You can’t blame any of the bandwagon-jumpers, though. E L James’ S&M trilogy is quickly joining the likes of Twilight and The Hunger Games in terms of sales, and Amazon UK has reported that the books have become the best-selling books in the website’s 14-year history, overtaking the Harry Potter series in just four months.

The crowd at Barnes & Noble on Friday night is excited but disciplined. Oh, they know all about discipline. . . . These are the feverish fans of E L James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the erotic novel that brought S&M out of the closet and into the suburbs. Spawned last year in the dark waters of online fan fiction, “Grey” has grown into a mega-selling trilogy, topping e-book and paperback charts. Newsweek ran a cover story last month about the series. On TV and op-ed pages, cultural pundits and feminists argue about what it means.