The Iron Heel – Jack London’s Oligarchic Rule
The name Jack London will ring up associations in most American readers from “To Build a Fire,” his enduringly …
Tag Archives: Fiction
A Test of Wills — Solving Small Crimes not the Big Ones
A Test of Wills, (1996) by Charles Todd is the first of what has become a series of some seventeen novels featuring Inspector …
The African Queen: WW I Adventureland
Needing a break from my sometimes distressing immersion in WWI memoirs and history [here, here and here] I thought I’d …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …
The Monstrous Enterprise — Céline on the War
The first one-fifth of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, [1934, Ralph Manheim translation, 1983] is from …
A Classic from Poland – “The Doll” by Boleslaw Prus
The most unusual book in my reading universe this year has to be the 1890 Polish classic, The Doll (“Lalka”) …
WW I: The Call of the Soil – Blood and Glory from France
Many of the novels written about World War I, by those who fought in it, didn’t appear until a decade …
Beware of Pity – Says Forgotten Austrian Novelist
“Beware of Pity.” Who would think to proffer such advice, in a novel no less, repeatedly and in great detail? …
On War Resistance
“If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched today for some utterly preposterous war, a war …
WW I: On the Eastern Front in The Forest of the Hanged
World War I as it is written of and imagined in European and American minds is almost entirely of what …
Reading Vienna
In the quieter and cooler hours between visiting museums, decoding monuments, walking the hot wide avenues of Vienna I …
Croatian Nights — New Fiction from Croatia
My literary companion during 5 days in Croatia has been Croatian Nights a joint effort of 19 stories by Croatian and British …