Fiction Revisited

Websites are provided to further explore these works and/or authors.  WriteContent is also interested in recommendations from readers who have had one of those experiences with a book that compelled them to pass it along to another reader. Send an email so we can check the book out.
 

James Joyce's  Ulysses revolutionized the novel, and Finnegans Wake pushed language to the limits of commmunication. In Ulysses, Joyce uses the interior monologue of his characters to record the events of one ordinary day, in the lives of three ordinary figures. Websites: The International James Joyce Foundation has links to all the great Joyce sites.   Also Work In Progress

 Dostoevsky's, the Idiot, was written shortly after Crime and Punishment . He created Prince Myshkin, one of literature's great characters, a Christ-like young man caught up in the materialistic lives of the aristocratic Yepanchins, and the tragic "love" triangle of Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna.  Also see Notes From the Underground . Website:  My Fydor Dostoevsky Home page

This collection of  poems contains all those pieces Dylan Thomas wished preserved. He made the selection in 1952, the year before his death. Also see Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and Under Milk Wood.  Website: Academy of American Poets

Author of Steppenwolf and Demian, Herman Hesse once again deals with the conflict between flesh and spirit through two medieval men, one content with his religion and monastic life, the other in search of worldly salvation.  Website: Hermann Hesse Home Page

Move over Jane Eyre, Villette is the other darker literary masterpiece from Charlotte Bronte. Website: The Bronte Sisters

  Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of discovery, personal, historical, and geographical. It is a vast portrait of four genrations in the life of an American family told by a grandson through his grandmother's letters.

  The story of a boy from a noble family who becomes disgusted with people, climbs into a tree and never comes down. He travels from tree to tree while having a full life. A satire that balances fantasy and reality, Calivno's intent was for his protaganist, the Baron Cosimo, to be the "Don Quixote of the Enlightenment." In this case the utopian society exists in the trees. Another wonderful book full of humor and love is Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City.

 The prolific Canadian author of  The Deptford Trilogy , The Salterton Trilogy, and Cornish Trilogy . Robertson Davies' writing is rich, dense and amusing--his characters  emblematic and idiosyncratic. You laugh out loud while learning the most amazing things, especially in this last Davies novel. A good introduction to Robertson Davies' writing is The Rebel Angels .

  I discovered Stevie Smith via the movie "Stevie Smith" with Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith. These are wonderful witty poems containing all the quiet, and sometimes desperation, of the London suburban life that Stevie lived. She died in 1971, shortly after receiving the Queen's Medal for Poetry.

  This collection of 37 stories contains most of Raymond Carver's best. Carver writes about ordinary people struggling with everyday problems. "It's possible," wrote Raymond Carver, "to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language . . . with immense, even startling power."  His minimalist stories reveal a poetic landscape full of anxiety, disturbing lonliness, but sudden revelation.  Robert Altman's movie, "Short Cuts" was based on some of Carver's stories.

 Author of Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad, in Nostromo, uses an adventure story, with a larger than life hero and a convoluted tale of love, revolutionary intrigue, and human passion, to vividly detail the insidious effects of greed in the silver mines of the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana.  Conrad uses the historical setting of Latin American politics to craft his pessimistic vision on the brutal essence of human nature, giving the reader an insight into the human condition. Website: Joseph Conrad Pages

  This book is not for the prudish or faint-hearted. Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend that Hawkes had a strange and wonderful mind.  She also said of his writing that "this is the grotesque with all stops out."  John Hawke's surreal writing once again explores sex and death, this time with the protagonist Cyril, who pursues his  romantic vision of sexual multiplicity in a primitive Mediterranean landscape.

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