Richard Grenier reviews Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” probing historical inaccuracies, political views, and the controversial depiction of Africa
Luciano Canfora’s new book shows how war was used by ancient societies to secure resources.
“Dune” serves as a compelling allegory for environmental challenges, with Arrakis mirroring Earth’s struggle with resource exploitation and ecological balance.
Hoffman defines what he believes are Poe’s themes in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” including incest, murder, and madness. He concludes that the tale is an allegory about the artist and his creation.
There is very little about the book — although this very little is quite important — that is prophetic. At least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but history.
Il terribile libro di Orwell ha segnato il nostro tempo, gli ha fornito una immagine ossessiva, la minaccia di un millennio assai prossimo, e dicendo “quel giorno verrà…” ci ha impegnato tutti nell’attesa di quel giorno.
Dear Hannah: I’ve read your book The Origins of Totalitarianism, absorbed, for the past two weeks. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought of, at the very least, a decade, and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is.
A doctor stricken with cancer, Doctor Winter, gets called into a mining town to examine the victims of an underground explosion at the mine…
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever.
“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” by H.P. Lovecraft follows the story of a medical intern working at a psychiatric hospital who becomes fascinated with Joe Slater, a patient from the Catskill Mountains, known for his barbaric and isolated upbringing.
A darkly comedic spy novel, “Slow Horses” by Mick Herron, explores disgraced MI5 agents navigating bureaucratic absurdity and redemption in a decaying Slough House.
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well.
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?
A scientist who writes fiction is as rare as a dancing bear. As Samuel Johnson might have remarked on seeing such a thing in the streets of London, one is not surprised to see it done well, but simply to see it done at all.
“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is taken from Walden. In it, Thoreau makes the argument for his going to live in the woods.
“I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.”
Born to the British aristocracy in 1917, Jessica Mitford rebelled against her privileged upbringing and made her own mark as a muckraking journalist with her best-selling The American Way of Death (1963), an expose of the funeral industry.
Frederick Douglass tells the story of his coming to literacy by describing the world opening up for him as he learns his letters and the range of emotions this process evokes in him.
What will be the significance of the written word now that newer mass media, less demanding psychologically and yet perhaps more potent politically, have developed
America, John Perkins tells us, is a land of innocents, and all we must do to reclaim our purity is to buy a hybrid or write our Congressman. Perkins’s account is neither honest, nor a sound analysis of global world order.
Like his heroes, who vacillate between nature und spirit, Hesse as a narrator feels conflicting impulses toward realism and lyricism. In Siddhartha he reached an extreme of symbolic lyricism.
Eco’s novel is not only an entertaining narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327. It is also a chronicle of the 14th century’s religious wars, a history of monastic orders and a compendium of heretical movements.
The protagonist of this prophetic last work of Guido Morselli is the sole survivor of the human race (H.G. of the title, which is taken from a Latin translation of the neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus, stands for humani generis) who ironically has returned to the world after attempting an elaborate mode of suicide in a subterranean lake inside a mountain.
The ‘Morselli affair’ compelled the literary establishment to ask itself some awkward questions. The easiest explanation for the rejection is that his work is unlike anything else in post-war Italian fiction.
“The Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis is an inspirational novel for intellectuals. It concerns the ever-more-successful career of Beth Harmon, from her early days in the Methuen Home orphanage, an institution as garishly oppressive as Dotheboys Hall in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” to her still-youthful triumph over the Russian grandmaster of chess, Vasily Borgov.
This novel weaves a web of deception and intrigue around the seemingly innocuous backdrop of a children’s Halloween party, where the unexpected becomes a haunting reality.
In the following excerpt, originally published in Italian in 1965, Eco offers a detailed examination of the narrative formula that Fleming employed in all the Bond novels, a strategy Eco regards as “the basis of the success of the ‘007’ saga. ”
Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood ended with both the little girl and her grandmother dead and no hunter to save them. The Grimm brothers softened the ending to suit their intention of entertainment rather than the moralizing of Perrault’s tales.
Fahrenheit 451 is an indictment of censorship and expurgation, so the fact that this book was expurgated and marketed by the publisher that way for 13 years before the author became aware of the abuse is particularly ironic.
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