A great selection! I was just thinking about Queen of Spades as I'm participating in Simon Haisell's year long read of War&Peace and we just read the chapters where Nikolai is cheated out of a fortune in faro by Dohlokov.
Russian authors and gambling! Think of the literary loss if our current 24-7 gambling had been around in the 19th century.
I had to teach Of Mice and Men as a home tutor and I wept as I was talking about it. I have a mentally disabled son and the constant need to protect, even to the end, resonated at a very personal level.
If you haven't read it yet, you might enjoy Stephen Vizinczey's Truth and Lies in Literature. His essays in that collection touch on some of the things you've highlighted here.
These are all great suggestions especially Bartleby the Scrivner. There probably isn't anyone writing who hasn't thought of themselves as a bit like Bartleby as a responsible clerk noting down the sometimes empty temporal and transactions of life that suppress one's spirit. You might not agree but I would also also suggest Philip Roth's "Goodbye Columbus" as a textual witness to the ongoing war between men and women where the fixed idea of one's survival gets wound up too intimately with gender. Many of these excellent recommendations discuss games and the game in Goodbye Columbus the game of tennis between a man and a woman. I don't think Roth ever quite fully understood women beyond a fixed genderal stereotype. Roth is not unlike Ted Hughes feeling his genius imperiled when considered alongside the superlative brilliance of any woman. Goodbye Columbus demonstrates how the patriarchal continually harms itself and others through diminished male perception. Both Roth's and Ted Hughes' creative lives were incomplete in their reductive valuation of women as competition or very limited campanion, thereby constantly companion, an always existing potential positive into an undesireable negative. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were spiritual companions in the very best way possible. Thanks so much for this list. It is one of the best I have ever seen.
So many books... But at least these are short. I haven't read any Wharton, Zweig or Pushkin, so I'll likely start with one of those. BTW, which WWII doorstopper are you referring to?
I rather suspect that the anti-capitalist clique is pretty much confined to chronic underperformers.
A great selection! I was just thinking about Queen of Spades as I'm participating in Simon Haisell's year long read of War&Peace and we just read the chapters where Nikolai is cheated out of a fortune in faro by Dohlokov.
Russian authors and gambling! Think of the literary loss if our current 24-7 gambling had been around in the 19th century.
Haha yes, lots of gambling!
I had to teach Of Mice and Men as a home tutor and I wept as I was talking about it. I have a mentally disabled son and the constant need to protect, even to the end, resonated at a very personal level.
If you haven't read it yet, you might enjoy Stephen Vizinczey's Truth and Lies in Literature. His essays in that collection touch on some of the things you've highlighted here.
These are all great suggestions especially Bartleby the Scrivner. There probably isn't anyone writing who hasn't thought of themselves as a bit like Bartleby as a responsible clerk noting down the sometimes empty temporal and transactions of life that suppress one's spirit. You might not agree but I would also also suggest Philip Roth's "Goodbye Columbus" as a textual witness to the ongoing war between men and women where the fixed idea of one's survival gets wound up too intimately with gender. Many of these excellent recommendations discuss games and the game in Goodbye Columbus the game of tennis between a man and a woman. I don't think Roth ever quite fully understood women beyond a fixed genderal stereotype. Roth is not unlike Ted Hughes feeling his genius imperiled when considered alongside the superlative brilliance of any woman. Goodbye Columbus demonstrates how the patriarchal continually harms itself and others through diminished male perception. Both Roth's and Ted Hughes' creative lives were incomplete in their reductive valuation of women as competition or very limited campanion, thereby constantly companion, an always existing potential positive into an undesireable negative. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were spiritual companions in the very best way possible. Thanks so much for this list. It is one of the best I have ever seen.
So many books... But at least these are short. I haven't read any Wharton, Zweig or Pushkin, so I'll likely start with one of those. BTW, which WWII doorstopper are you referring to?
thank you Liza! some new ones and some I will now return to (Ethan Frome)!
Thanks for these picks. Haven't read White Nights or Chess Story. Will check those out. The ability to cry at great art is a gift!