There was one night reading this, when the story affected my breathing,
heart rate, and time left on this planet, for the worse, as I galloped through
it even though I knew every paragraph could hold up to a few years worth of
study, if I hadn’t been so impatient to learn more!
Very crudely, White seems to say that it doesn’t matter what people do, goodness matters and
the imaginative and usually obtrusive ways in which he shows good is often
quieter than evil, more basic and durable, but sometimes not as strong, seem to
me the discipline he tried to train himself in, to get it all down and write
the novel in the first place.
That story often feels more painted than written,
and when written, written in Australian and not English; people seem to speak
when its someone else’s turn to, and White’s dark sense of humour (and
sometimes disgust with modernity and his homeland) very nearly subvert the more
wholesome instruction he is putting across.
I found bits of Henry Green,
Elizabeth Bowen, Henry James, and Flannery O Connor, but in the end, White is a
genius and an original, and reading Riders In The Chariot has been one of the
greatest literary experiences of my life.
Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.
Medhurst has put together a
definitive history of the North London Working Class from the
Second World War to The Noughties, relying mainly on interviews
with the inhabitants, as well as his own experiences.
In some
ways, this milieu, despite its disproportionate contribution to the
arts, music, sport, and culture in general, remains relatively
unknown, with north London lacking the industrial base normally
associated with a working class. Medhurst is their champion, an
advocate for their unashamed cosmopolitanism and creativity.
I Could Be So Good For You tackles head-on the pernicious and implicitly racist fiction that London, most especially north London, has no "real" working class in comparison to a more "authentic" working class in a place called "the North".
In doing so it offers a history and a portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, based on a wide and original range of sources including personal memoirs, autobiographies, collected oral histories and new interviews conducted by the author. The result is an important social history and a rich panorama of working-class life -…
Borges has the confidence and
courage to write without any concessions to genre or previously
understood conceptions of normality, he scares nothing off the
reader and does not know where they stand with him.
I believe he is
obsessed with ideas pertaining to eternity, and the illusionary
nature of space and time, which stand behind his otherwise
bizarre and sometimes confusing plots, that often, superficially,
resemble detective stories or fragmentary memoirs. Wring that is
in service to ideas is often poorer for it, but Borges dramatises
philosophy in a way that is as readable as it is original.
Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.
For thirty-five years, two women frighten each other through the fading twilight of the last century, their existence an unacknowledged tragedy of manners. Confusing their duty to one another for the feelings they're too busy to mention, their desire for "modest social success" ends by asphyxiating whatever lies within its grasp.
From the art galleries of Manhattan Island to the pubs of the North Yorkshire Moors, Nature and Necessity is a wild reimagining of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a story of siblings battling for survival and supremacy, a war story without armies, and a warning that even the most promising and prosperous of lives can be crushed by the fear of uttering the confession: I love you.
Toad is an eternal archetype with enduring relevance, fascinating my children as much as he did me in his pursuit of thrilling egoistical self-satisfaction.
His peers, Mole, The Rat, and Badger, are there to show the value of friendship, and the near-mystical riverbank and wooded setting is a beautiful one, but the book is Toad’s show, as he drowns out every voice other than his, to very entertaining effect.
Spend a season on the river bank and take a walk on the wild side . . .
Spring is in the air and Mole has found a wonderful new world. There's boating with Ratty, a feast with Badger and high jinx on the open road with that reckless ruffian, Mr Toad of Toad Hall. The four become the firmest of friends, but after Toad's latest escapade, can they join together and beat the wretched weasels?
PLUS A behind-the-scenes journey, including author profile, a guide to who's who, activities and more.
One of the few books that moved me to tears when it was read to me as a child, and moved me to tears again when reading it as an adult to my children.
The strange thing is that on both occasions, my responses came as a surprise to me when they really it should not have, as Wilde loves to push a reader's emotions as far as they can go, completely unashamed in his brazen use of sentimentality and pathos.
Nine haunting fairy tales: The Happy Prince, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend, The Remarkable Rocket, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Star Child, The Fisherman and his Soul - Oscar Wilde made up these very special fairy tales for his own children. They loved to hear about the happy prince who was not really as happy as he seemed, and the selfish giant who learned to love the little children he had once hated.
Writing for "young adults" is fraught with difficulty. Are they children who think like grown-ups or borderline adults with children's taste? Bentley Hart evades the problem by writing a book that neither talks down to nor seeks to educate his potential readers, instead treating them with respect and assuming that they will find what he does interesting. Which in the case of my teenage daughter proved correct; the story was fantastical and the characters completely relatable.
The “genre” of the modern Gnostic novel encompasses an especially eclectic range of works. With this book—a fantasy by turns dark, absurd, comic, frantic, and lyrical—David Bentley Hart joins a company that includes figures as diverse as Georges Bernanos, Anatole France, David Lindsay, Philip K. Dick, Patrick White, Umberto Eco, William Gaddis, Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, John Crowley, and Philip Pullman. In Kenogaia, a clockwork universe, an oppressive global society of ever-present surveillance, and the coming of age of its protagonist, Michael Ambrosius, are all disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious child from beyond the stars.…
