Category: Review

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”

John Irving is sometimes dismissed by literary snobs as merely a “popular” writer—like a  Stephen King, say, or a Dan Brown. Unsurprisingly, King himself reviewed A Prayer for Owen Meany, supplying a blurb for the front cover: “Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] highly textured and carefully wrought world.” Irving does rank… Continue reading John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany”

Aldous Huxley came from a privileged background: he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, famous Victorian biologist and agnostic spokesman (known as “Darwin’s bulldog”), and on his mother’s side was the great nephew of the famous Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and with that pedigree graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. By 1932 he… Continue reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

Ernest Hemingway was the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. I’m sure some people might beg to differ, but I don’t think their objections would be completely serious. Sure he’s fallen somewhat out of fashion due to his machismo chest-beating and well-publicized misogyny. For which defects in his character a lot of people,… Continue reading Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”

I’ve always said, and every right-thinking person should agree, that Catch-22 is the greatest American novel of the post-war period (that’s World War II if you’re counting), and the greatest of all post-modern novels. Recent decades have shown that a significant number of readers and critics agree with me, at least with assigning a classic status to… Continue reading Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”

To talk about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter immediately after considering Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is kind of like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would have put it. In both texts, a young and sympathetic woman is shamed by society because of an extramarital affair that winds up producing a child. Both novels present the helpless plight of… Continue reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”

Thomas Hardy, who always thought of himself first as a poet, was nevertheless the most important novelist of late Victorian England. Dickens had died in 1870. George Elliott, Hardy’s great precursor as a Victorian realist, had died in 1880, and it is Hardy whose novels shine brightest in the last two decades of Britain’s nineteenth… Continue reading Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”

The Maltese Falcon is a novel that is probably less well known than the film that was made from it—something, I suppose, like Gone With the Wind or The Godfather. In all these cases one could say that the book inspired the film, and the film still sends inspired viewers back to the book. The 1941 film noir classic (actually the third… Continue reading Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”

Graham Greene is still considered one of the major British authors of the twentieth century, and the sheer volume of his major novels seems likely to keep him there for the foreseeable future. He achieved both critical and popular success in his career, dividing his time between his serious novels and what he called his… Continue reading Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”

Robert Graves was a highly acclaimed English author generally associated with the earlier twentieth century (though in fact he lived to be 90 and died in 1985). He was a poet, a memoirist, a critic, a biographer, a classical scholar and translator, and a novelist, publishing nearly 150 significant texts in his lifetime. Among these… Continue reading Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”