by Franz Kafka The inclusion of quite a few posthumously published works in Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories fills me with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, given that Kafka requested that his unpublished stories be destroyed after his death, I feel as though I have no right to look upon them. As a…
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edited by Nora Gallagher and Lisa Myers Don’t let it be said that I’m a closed-minded person, but, given all my constant reading, I’ve begun to get a better feel of what I’m likely to enjoy and those that set off my cynicism. And my apprehension was almost palpable when I first picked up Tools…
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by Philip K. Dick You can really feel the influence of William Burroughs and Ken Kesey on a work like A Scanner Darkly. While I would assume this comes from Dick having read and being a big fan of the aforementioned authors, it could just as reasonably stem from being a part of the drug…
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by Cormac McCarthy In The Road, a man and his son wander through a post-apocalyptic America, searching out food and shelter, trying to avoid the “bad guys” who also roam the wastes. While the story is about survival in the most harrowing of scenarios, the focus is on the growing relationship between our two main…
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by William Faulkner The more I read, the more I seem to catch while reading. It wasn’t until my second read-through of Naked Lunch that I really feel I began to appreciate it, and even the recent rereading of Animal Farm really made me feel that at least some of my study of literature is…
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by George Orwell It’s been a while since I picked up Animal Farm, last in tenth grade, when they forced my class to read it. While I recall enjoying the story, I forgot about most of the finer details, so it seemed appropriate to revisit it. I hoped that, given my increased exposure to literature…
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by Vendela Vida I hate talking about books I didn’t like, especially those that thoroughly disappointed me, like The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s a difficult task to express such a thing effectively without being mean or, at least, discouraging, while remaining honest. It’s not even that this was necessarily the worst of the worst…
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by P. G. Wodehouse Carry On, Jeeves was my first foray into the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, and, I must say, I had no idea it could be this wonderful. The book is made up of a series of vignettes in which Bertram Wooster and his butler, Jeeves, work to help Bertie’s friends get…
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by André Alexis I often go on about the best stories being the ones to elicit the strongest emotions, and probably the clearest indicator that an author has succeeded at this is by making me cry. Alexis’ novel is a unique case where this is concerned, not simply because he made me cry, but because…
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by H. Leighton Dickson It was with great hesitation that I picked up To Journey in the Year of the Tiger. I, of course, kept an open mind, keeping the possibility that I would enjoy the story, but I was worried, mainly due to past experiences with self-published fantasy. Thankfully, I ended up enjoying Dickson’s…
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