Book cover of Fear

Book description

A bourgeois housewife's affair is discovered, and a blackmailer turns her comfortable life into a nightmare of apprehension

Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother tedious after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Fear as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Speaking of psychoanalysis, like much of Stefan Zweig’s work, Fear was written at the dawn of the Freudian era, in 1913 (though it wasn’t published until 1920).

A married upper-class woman is blackmailed by the working-class girlfriend of her lover, and while the tale of her panic is sometimes just an illustration of the then-new concept of the subconscious, it’s riveting anyway.

In the fifties, it became the closest Roberto Rossellini ever came to making a film noir, with Ingrid Bergman.

From Laurence's list on novellas that transcend time.

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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

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