Richard Adams analyzes the title and opening paragraphs of Heart of Darkness, showing that neither gives the reader clues regarding the subject matter and focus of the story.
Canadian Author Margaret Atwood’s sixth novel will remind most readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That can hardly be helped. Any new fictional account of how things might go horribly wrong risks comparisons either with George Orwell’s classic or with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Il Rosso di Jack London Eccola di nuovo! Quell’improvvisa esplosione di suono, mentre ne calcolava la durata sull’orologio, Bassett la paragonò alla tromba di un
One of the more diverting aspects of Lolita, the most controversial best seller of the century, has been the considerable speculative curiosity about the private life and personality of Vladimir Nabokov, the virtually unknown university professor who now, at the age of sixty-one, finds himself world famous as the author of this nettlesome novel.
A couple, whose careers (tennis player and actress) depend on youth, are forced to deal with a gift of a single dose of rejuvenating medicine that cannot be divided or shared. This story was the basis for The Fountain of Youth, a 1956 TV pilot for a proposed anthology series, produced by Desilu and written, directed, and hosted by Orson Welles.
In the following review, Tom O’Brien cites flaws in the plausibility of Atwood’s dystopia as depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Having soothed themselves with these comfortable falsehoods, people proceeded on their way to make Orwell’s prognostications come true. Bit by bit, and step by step, the world has been marching toward the realization of Orwell’s nightmares; but because the march has been gradual, people have not realized how far it has taken them on this fatal road.
Hemingway managed to catch and hold in his novel a set of attitudes toward war and human love which are essentially ageless. Moreover, the prose style in which he says his say about the people he knew in that now-ancient war has remained for the most part singularly invulnerable to the assaults of time.
by Joan London Of all Jack London’s serious works, none has been more widely misapprehended than Martin Eden, which he began to write soon after
Robert Hass, in his introduction to the Bantam edition of “Martin Eden”, points out that Jack London simply reflects the culture of his time, a culture that was dominated by imperialism, social Darwinism, and a style of aggressive masculinity.
In the following essay, published in 1970, Spinner discusses the autobiographical novel Martin Eden, which he regards as one of the first bleakly existentialist anti-hero novels in American literature.
Joseph Needham, one of the leading biologists of his day, strongly proclaims that Huxley has gotten the science—biology and psychology as well as philosophy—exactly right. Brave New World clearly shows what lies ahead, and it should be required reading especially for those who trust in science to save the world.
Huxley’s preoccupation with and concern about the increasing prosperity and numbers of the proletariat found expression in Brave New World. Huxley felt the masses had grown more menacing with population increases and he wrote the novel at a time when it seemed mankind could not recover from the problems of war, depression, and explosive technological progress.
by Sam S. Baskett The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. —“Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens When Martin Eden
A candid conversation with the author of The Vampire Chronicles about sex and violence, gays and bloodsuckers, and her helpful fans from the S&M scene
Book burning and repression of thought and ideas are far from the only themes in Fahrenheit 451. The novel comments on many other aspects of modern life that Bradbury deplores, and it is a striking vindication of his vision that many of the aspects of modern life he deplored at that time are even more pronounced today.
The novel opens with “fireman” Guy Montag exulting in his job of burning books: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In his futuristic society, where
Fifty books remain—the product of Jack London’s fevered spirit and tremendous energy. Of them, none is better than Martin Eden. Like all his books, it is uneven in structure, sometimes clumsy in expression, at times mawkish in tone. Yet it possesses great lasting power, having more vitality today than it did the day it issued from the press.
by Sam S. Baskett Vividly embodying as it does the tangled strands of Jack London’s personal, cultural, intellectual and artistic experience, Martin Eden remains a
Virtually from its appearance in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s futuristic novel The Handmaid’s Tale has announced its indebtedness to George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s nightmarish future is written all over Atwood’s similarly near-future vision of the misogynist theocracy of Gilead.
A broke, struggling Dostoevsky pitches “Crime and Punishment” to M. N. Katkov, the editor of a literary magazine