Author: Jay Ruud

When, at the age of 15, I first read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ classic novel of the protagonist’s struggle to rise above child poverty in a society seemingly structured to keep him poor, it was the first book that made me tear up at the end, that glorious end with the angelic Agnes ever “pointing upward.” I… Continue reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead”

Before he became a counter-culture icon of the 60s as head of the “Merry Pranksters,” mixing LSD consumption and multi-media performances and launching the Grateful Dead into stardom, as documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey was a lowly orderly working the night shift at a mental health facility in Menlo Park,… Continue reading Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

There is no question that James Joyce is the most significant and influential English language writer of the twentieth century. As the preeminent stylist in English, with the uncanny ability to adopt style to situation, the premiere example of the use of “stream of consciousness,” the creator of a new kind of short story that… Continue reading James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

When I was in graduate school, some time back in the Jurassic period, I was assigned Henry James’ The Ambassadors to read for a seminar in literary theory. I remember slashing my way through the morass of James’ language like Henry Morton Stanley macheting his way through the thickest jungles in his search for Dr. Livingstone, he… Continue reading Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most respected and influential writers in the world, particularly in the English-speaking world, alive today. His 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature is a fairly significant indication of that, but he also won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day, and has been short-listed… Continue reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”