The grim novella Benito Cereno, written in 1855 during a transitional period in Melville’s career, represents a remarkable fusion of the themes and techniques that characterize his art. F. O. Mathiesson calls it “one of the most sensitively poised pieces… Read More ›
The Bell Jar, like so much of Plath’s writing, is loosely based on her own experiences; the novel was, in fact, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because Plath feared it might anger or hurt the people in her… Read More ›
Neither of Kosinski’s first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The Painted Bird (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy’s survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically,… Read More ›
“There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight” (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section… Read More ›
With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one… Read More ›
In many ways, Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence…. Read More ›
Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine tells the story of a rural working-class community crumbling apart as big industry and corporate incursions leave its people having to survive by making money instead of supporting each other through farming, barter,… Read More ›
During a Penguin Online Auditorium conversation with college students in 1999, Dorothy Allison described her novel Bastard Out of Carolina as a “story about a working class family, people who are trying very hard to take loving care of each… Read More ›
Following the highly acclaimed short-story collection, Pangs of Love (1991), this debut novel by David Wong Louie represents an in-depth exploration of the theme of cultural assimilation. Critical opinion of The Barbarians Are Coming is generally very positive, praising Louie’s… Read More ›
When Robert Penn Warren published Band of Angels in 1955, the most frequent critical response was to compare the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Such comparisons spoke volumes about the indelibility of Mitchell’s single novelistic… Read More ›
Carson McCullers’s short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café, brings the uncanny to the fore. Three bizarre main characters populate the dreary southern landscape to advance McCullers’s recurrent themes of isolation and loss. The female Amazon figure, Miss Amelia… Read More ›
Published in 1922, Babbitt won praise from contemporary critics for Sinclair Lewis’s use of photographic realism, believable American dialogue, and satirical portrayal of small-town America. The novel relates the experience of businessman George Folansbee Babbitt in the typical Midwestern city… Read More ›
Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles… Read More ›
Literariness Journal Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Inaugural Issue) Theme: Digital and Analog Cultures The inaugural issue of Literariness Journal seeks contributions that interrogate the complex intersections between digital and analog cultures. We invite scholarship that explores the values, practices, technologies,… Read More ›
Although Ernest Gaines lived in California from the age of 15, all of his stories and novels are deeply rooted in the Black culture and storytelling traditions of his native Louisiana. Gaines was born on the River Lake Plantation in… Read More ›
This fictional autobiography and narrative achieved belated critical and commercial success during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel’s first audience took it to be a straight autobiography, much to the surprise of Johnson, who noted that it was no “human document.”… Read More ›
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not an autobiography and not by Alice B. Toklas. Rather, it is a fictional text written by Gertrude Stein and populated by colorful characters that happen to share the names of real people,… Read More ›
Set near the source of the Amazon River in the Peruvian Andes, Matthiessen’s novel begins in the last outpost of civilization, a ramshackle mission town. Here, the missionaries Leslie and Andy Huben meet the newly arrived missionaries Martin and Hazel… Read More ›
Who is John Galt? This question opens Ayn Rand’s acclaimed novel Atlas Shrugged. At first just a joke, this query begins a serious investigation on the part of protagonist Dagny Taggart to discover the identity of this man. She discovers… Read More ›
In World of Light, a 1979 documentary featuring May Sarton, the author frankly discusses many pressing concerns: attitudes toward the aged in the United States, being true to oneself, writing as self-realization, passionate relationships between women (sexual or otherwise), and… Read More ›
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