https://danivoiceovers.com/f6mr7ka57e Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is another of the “no-brainers” that appear on this list. It was immediately popular upon its first publication in 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. It has remained popular for more than sixty years, and is one of the most widely taught novels in high schools and… Continue reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”
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D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”
https://paradiseperformingartscenter.com/v5c3xrw D.H. Lawrence has always been a controversial figure in English letters. Though some of his novels (particularly The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers) had been well received, his unorthodox lifestyle and the frank treatment of sex, especially in his later novels, alienated many readers and critics, so by the time of his death in 1930,… Continue reading D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”
Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead”
source link 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”
Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
http://www.mscnantes.org/ushmtxfsxar 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”
James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
Cheap Tramadol 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”
Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”
https://www.elevators.com/03x6gs2p 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’s “Never Let Me Go”
https://getdarker.com/editorial/articles/p602o490bp 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’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany”
follow site 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’s “Brave New World”
https://alldayelectrician.com/c5aekvhx 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’s “A Farewell to Arms”
https://www.mbtn.net/?p=1hlzso2tbg 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”