Category: Uncategorized

It is not difficult to see why The Call of the Wild is and has been London’s most read book, and it is not difficult to see why it will remain so for the foreseeable future

It is interesting and feels worthwhile to note that, of the four great Greek playwrights, Aristophanes is clearly the writer — to include thinker — of

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.