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Dickens’ Little Dorrit, particularly the tenth chapter of its first part — a chapter titled ‘Containing the whole Science of Government’ — offers the reader a rather clear instance of one of the World Literature’s firmest rules — though it does, admittedly, have its few exceptions. This rule states that…

When all is said and done, the great indictment against the Baby Boomers — it will surely come, as with all comeuppance — will be encapsulated in the fact that

Someone once said that translation is its own form of art, and the principle behind this statement can be easily demonstrated. To do this, we will use the famous words that Louis XIV may or may not — most likely not — have said:

The reader who chiefly knows the King Arthur legend through the work of Thomas Malory — or, worse, through any of the large number of lesser derivatives — does himself a great disservice. The original in this case — as is often the case — is the best, and it does, in fact, feature — in Chretien de Troyes — one who is perhaps the most underrated author in the entirety of the Western Canon.

Now that the twentieth century is twenty-five years in the rear-view mirror, we have crystallized for us the enduring question of the time’s art (post-WII, at least).

The first three chapters to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening offer an easy-to-see and instructive example into showing without telling. The point of these opening chapters is to get across to the reader the idea of turmoil beneath the apparently idyllic, and Chopin cleverly begins with the veneer.

Below is the first twenty-three lines to the first in a series of poems about Philip Bunyan — better known as Welterweight Phil — the younger brother to Paul and Peter Bunyan. This first piece tells of Phil’s youth; how he, born in 1850s Maine, grew up middle-sized to his oversized and undersized brothers; how he, being a protective, pugnacious youth, fought for their reputations; and how he, even before beginning upon his life of victorious conquests, won for himself the nickname ‘Welterweight Phil.’

Philip K. Dick’s Penultimate Truth strikes one as an example of science fiction that Dickens would have been a reader of, though that Great would, of course, feel himself compelled to edit as he went along. In particular, the opening chapters are a wonderful example of an author who well knows what authorship is supposed to be, one who can perfectly mask a very deep and very important criticism of society behind the veneer of fictional entertainment.

Asimov’s Full Future is a title that can be applied to a wider series of novels that is itself made up of three initially independent book series by Isaac Asimov. Despite this original state of being unconnected, the three series were weaved together into one by the author in his later works, and they form for us now one gigantic series of science fiction that represents one of the highest achievements of literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

With all the progress daily made in the modern world, it is important, I find, to always keep one’s head on a swivel; otherwise, that progress might make a sudden leap forward while passing in its stride that which should come along with it. It is for this reason of responsibility that it must be here demonstrated the social unacceptability of the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings, which need but swim in the wake of the determined same of the former Washington Redskins.