Badenheim 1939 is a skillful fictional answer to the question that many have asked about the Holocaust: Why was there not more resistance? Perhaps the answer to the question is something much more simple than has been considered, as Holocaust… Read More ›
The German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) started work in 1938 on one of his major novels, The Axe of Wandsbek, a psychological analysis of individual behavior in everyday life under the Third Reich. It depicts the evil in the structures… Read More ›
This novel appeared seven years after One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the author has said that he began it much earlier, as early as January 1958, when as a journalist he witnessed the ouster of President Pérez Jiménez in… Read More ›
A gripping novel that challenges the notions of innocence and guilt, The Assault is considered among the greatest works of contemporary European fiction. Broken into five episodes, spanning 1945 to 1981, the novel by Dutch author Harry Mulisch (1927–2010) is… Read More ›
The fifth published novel by Germany’s Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), Arch of Triumph was first published in the United States in 1945; the German edition followed in 1946. The story takes place in Paris between November 11, 1938, and the… Read More ›
This later novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is markedly different from his most well-known work, Things Fall Apart (1958), in both form and content. The novel, set in a fictional 20th-century African country representative of Nigeria, examines the… Read More ›
The Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote Amerika between 1911 and 1914, but the novel was not published until 1927, several years after the author’s death. Kafka never crossed the Atlantic to America, and much of his knowledge of the… Read More ›
All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the disillusionment of Paul Baumer, a young foot soldier fighting in World War I. Written by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), this depiction of the horrors of war is one of the most renowned… Read More ›
Published just following World War II, All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) speaks vehemently and passionately against vanity, the desire to control, and the desire for dictatorial power. Curious and existential, it is a type of philosophical… Read More ›
The most popular novel of the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (1947– ), The Alchemist combines philosophical ideas and words of wisdom about ambition, perseverance, and success. Since its publication in 1988, the novel has has sold over 150 million copies… Read More ›
The post–World War II novel Absent without Leave represents something of a change of literary pace for Heinrich Böll (1917–85), at least in terms of its formal and stylistic strategies. Although some thematic concerns persist from his earlier work of… Read More ›
“A Widow’s Quilt” was first published in the New Yorker magazine on June 6, 1977, just under a year before Warner’s death in May 1978. It was subsequently republished in a posthumous collection of her stories, One Thing Leading to… Read More ›
“The Withered Arm” by Thomas Hardy depicts the author’s fatalistic view of the world. The story, published in Blackwood Magazine in 1888 and in the collection Wessex Tales the same year, presents the characters as victims of a malevolent power… Read More ›
The World and Other Places is, to date, Jeanette Winterson’s only short story collection. In the afterword of the 1998 edition, Winterson explains how she wrote these 17 stories gradually over 12 years, after the publication of her first novel,… Read More ›
A detective story first published in the Strand Magazine in February 1893 and subsequently in the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Holmes is consulted by Mr. Grant Munro, on the subject of his wife’s mysterious behavior. Munro met… Read More ›
“You Should Have Seen the Mess” is included in the 1958 collection The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories by distinguished Edinburgh-born writer Muriel Spark. Since its initial publication, it has become one of Spark’s most anthologized stories, probably because of… Read More ›
“Youth: A Narrative” marks an important development in the literary career of Joseph Conrad. It is the first story in which Conrad draws on his own experience and the first to feature Marlow, the narrator also of Heart of Darkness… Read More ›
The coining of this term has generally been credited to the American psychologist William James, older brother of novelist Henry James. It was originally used by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness… Read More ›
Though the term metalanguage—a language that describes or analyzes another language— was in use well before the 1960s, it was around this time that theorists including Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics [1960]) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957] and Elements of… Read More ›
Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege… Read More ›
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