“Where is our Byron–our Scott–our Shakespeare? And in painting it is the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must, in most cases, content ourselves with copies…” This sort of lays the groundwork for the anxiety held within this novella. Written in the 1920s, there’s still a kind of irony that Wharton also has missed some of the greats of American literature. While she was a huge […]
Another Little Girl had come into the World
There’s probably a reason this book shows up in a lot of early college class, high school reading lists, and the AP exam. It’s a good book to be sure, but it’s kind of a book’s book. The story of a family, the story of a set of experiences, and the story of a voice, but it could so easily be mashed into a mold of “Haitian-American Immigrant Novel” and feel like it covers a lot of ground. The story itself is about a young […]
A LITERARY GONE GIRL!!! (Just kidding)
This is a perfectly fine novel completely misserved by the attention its received. Ooooh, an American man has gone missing in the Mediterranean and his parents want someone to find him! Must compare it to Patricia Highsmith! Oooooh a female narrator with a kind of ethereal voice narrates a strange marriage circumstance. Must compare it to Gone Girl! But it’s neither Gone Girl nor is it Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s something altogether different those, more slow burn, very little suspense, a kind of mystery, but less about […]
Look it’s not Mad Max even if people say it is
Stop trying to make this book be Mad Max; it’s not going to happen. No one is I realize, but there’s an embarrassing blurb on the back of the book that makes that reference. Instead, this book is about two women who vaguely recognize themselves waking up, chained, wreaked, and imprisoned in an Outback stronghold. They don’t like each other. It’s an imprisonment novel, but it’s not a captive horror movie genre type novel. This isn’t torture porn, luckily, and it’s not that ONE SCENE […]
And Other Stories is right
This is an ok collection. The star appeal I felt when I read A Curtain of Green was just not here. It’s strange because this collection came out only about a year after that one, and it strikes me as so obvious to only publish most of both collections or just combine them together, because a lot of these stories were pretty unforgettable. Eudora Welty (I have typed that as Wlety about 1000 times in my lifetime from back in my college days when I […]
I don’t know if this book was comforting or
This book provides an analysis for historical mistakes. Barbara Tuchman masterfully analyzes several famous moments in world history (cough cough Western history) to analyze what she refers to as folly or my personal favorite “woodenheadedness”. The idea here is that the causes for the folly might be myriad or diverse, but they fall under a few clear guidelines….as much perpetuated by a group than by an individual, there must have been reasonable and known alternatives….and there must have been fair warning that these were indeed […]
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