Henry Sugar, a wealthy man, decides to take on an extraordinary challenge – he wants to master an extraordinary skill in order to cheat at gambling games.
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
Watership Down (1972) came into being as a brief, whimsical tale of rabbits told to amuse Richard Adams’s daughters. Its popularity with them was such that finally he was forced to work out the ramifications of his simple story, and the novel took shape. A labor of love, it was inspired by the desire to tell a good story. The tone of the story reflects this attitude.
Tolstoy had barely finished What Then Must We Do? when he returned to an unfinished story which he had begun in 1882, and polished it
On one side of the warm Salinas River the Gabilan Mountains slowly rise; on the other, the valley side, trees line the bank. Through the willows and sycamores a path is worn, by boys coming down from ranches to swim and by tramps coming off the highway…
In a foreword to Brave New World written fourteen years after the book was first published, the author finds that society is embracing the attitudes he warned against even more quickly than he had originally thought.
When he was writing Of Mice and Men in early 1936, and even during the period between the novel’s completion and its publication, John Steinbeck’s expectations for the book were low. It was typical of Steinbeck to doubt the quality of his work after it was finished.
All Quiet on the Western Front has been widely praised as an antiwar novel, but William K. Pfeiler argues that more realistically the novel represents spoiled youth’s whining about the older generation.
Martin Eden è un romanzo dello scrittore statunitense Jack London che racconta la difficile vita di un ragazzo del popolo che lotta disperatamente per diventare uno scrittore, ispirato e sostenuto in questo dal suo amore per la bellezza e per Ruth, una giovane figlia dell’alta borghesia di San Francisco.
Huxley’s ideas have been subjected to much criticism. Those which have been most criticized deal with religion; they have been attacked not only by the critics who have been disturbed by their religious and philosophical implications, but by those who have been bored by Huxley’s occasionally excessive didacticism.
A Clockwork Orange is a futuristic warning against both mindless violence and the mechanical reconditioning that is often proposed as society’s solution to its ills. It offers a horrifying view of a future England in which gangs of hoodlums, or “droogs,” roam the streets freely, robbing, fighting, raping, and consuming illegal drugs and alcohol.
This introduction sets ‘Heart of Darkness’ in the context of Conrad’s life, sketches the process of its composition, and outlines its critical history.
The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors.
In this essay, Coral Howells discusses the presentation of female self-identity, memory, sensual experience, and Offred’s resistance to patriarchal authority in The Handmaid’s Tale
Rodion Raskolnikov is a young intellectual in his early twenties. Crushed by poverty, he has been forced to drop out of the university and now lives in a shabby little garret unable to pay the rent or buy food. With no prospects for the future, finding no outlet for his talents, he rages against a society callously indifferent to people like him.
The Man Who Planted Trees (French title: L’homme qui plantait des arbres) is an allegorical tale by French author Jean Giono, published in 1953. It tells the story of one shepherd’s long and successful singlehanded effort to re-forest a desolate valley in the foothills of the Alps in Provence throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Nel giugno del 1983 Playboy Usa incontra un maestro del brivido che nella sua successiva carriera avrebbe pubblicato oltre sessanta opere, tutte regolarmente entrate nella classifica dei bestseller. King racconta gli inizi molto difficili, il successo inaspettato e quella sottile linea di follia che tiene legata fin dal principio tutta la sua produzione.