A blockbuster of a book, with what was for Dickens a big theme: the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts – that however at the time of its publication had already been essentially abolished.
Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has lost much of its sting and one can easily find the subject overworked, although it cannot be denied that as a symbol for (…)
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"Bleak House" (1853) by Charles Dickens
12 February 2021, by Charles Dickens -
"Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens
5 February 2021, by Charles DickensThe only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.
The hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of (…) -
"Little Dorrit" (1857) by Charles Dickens
1 February 2021, by Charles DickensIn this very big and wide-ranging opus Dickens follows his eponymous heroine from the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in south London, where she had lived for the first twenty-plus years of her life and the first half of the book, across France and Switzerland with her newly-rich family on a Grand Tour to Italy, where she spends a couple of years rubbing shoulders with the hordes of semi-expatriate upper-class English that congregated there at the time — the novel is set in the mid-1820s — and (…)
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"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens
20 January 2021, by Charles DickensDickens’s second and best-known (and last) historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous opening lines "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . .".
This is one of his shortest novels and also his most overtly political one (with Hard Times), centred as it is on the violent injustices of the French revolution and on the despotism of the ancien régime that Dickens sees as having inevitably led to that (…) -
"Make Westing" and other stories by Jack London
16 January 2021, by Jack LondonTABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Misogynist (1897) A confirmed bachelor wakes up one morning to find that all females have suddenly disappeared and the world is now a purely masculine one! Things start rapidly going to pot as everyone, including our hero, desperately tries to survive. (8,600 words)
2. Their Alcove (1900) A man watches all the letters and mementos of the woman he had loved burn in his fireplace as he muses over the impact that their break-up has made on his life, and tries to (…) -
"Great Expectations" (1861) by Charles Dickens
15 January 2021, by Charles DickensThis is Dickens at his very best, or rather his greatest. A mature work, his penultimate novel, it gets off to a rousing start – the dramatic encounter of young Pip with an escaped convict takes place on page 2 –, the writing is absolutely sparkling, deeply infused with his profound humanity and his ever-present sense of humour, the characters are finely chiseled and marvelously, even famously full of life – notably the quite unforgettable Joe, and Biddy, and Estella, and Mrs. Haversham, and (…)
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"Our Mutual Friend" (1865), by Charles Dickens
10 January 2021, by Charles DickensThis last complete novel of Charles Dickens, his fourteenth, has a very strong theme, one of his best and most timeless: the Thames river that dominates the lives of those who work on and beside and near it and which symbolises the force and power and also violence of the current of life itself, a theme powerfully developed from the dramatic opening scene right through the book.
The novel has the full 800+ page-length that Dickens seems to have felt best at ease with and within which (…) -
"Suicides" and other stories by Guy de Maupassant
7 January 2021, by Guy de MaupassantTABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Suicides (1880) A letter is found beside a 57-year-old man who has just shot himself in a depressed state of mind, as dramatically explained in his letter. (1,800 words)
2. Lasting Love (1882) A group of hunters and their wives are debating the question of long-lasting (or otherwise) love after a copious dinner, and a retired Parisian doctor recounts the most intense and long-lasting affair he had ever encountered, involving a respectable pharmacist and a (...)
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"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (1869) - the last work of Charles Dickens
5 January 2021, by Charles DickensDickens’s last work, tragically interrupted by his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 58. It was a mystery novel, written to rise to the challenge of showing that he too could write in that new genre after the considerable success of his good friend Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), generally recognized as being the first mystery thriller in literature — although Dickens himself had innovated in the genre with his creation of the remarkably resourceful and penetrating (…)
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"The World of Null-A" (1945) by A. E. van Vogt
2 January 2021, by A. E. van VogtFirst published in monthly installments in the August-October 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, this fast-paced and very ambitious blockbuster novel set in 2580 A.D. was A. E. van Vogt’s fourth major novel in that glorious heyday-decade of science fiction, the golden forties.
Regularly reissued ever since in hardcover, paperback and foreign-language translations, it is certainly the author’s most-republished work, and one that, with Slan, established him definitively in the front (…)