by Iraj Pezeshkzad My Uncle Napoleon is a famous, cherished Iranian novel. Written in the ’70s, it was banned briefly after the 1979 revolution, presumably because of lewdness and sexuality. The story apparently struck such a chord in Iran because Pezeshkzad so accurately captured and poked fun at the widespread paranoia toward the British that…
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by Farley Mowat Never Cry Wolf is presented as the true account of Mowat’s time in the Canadian subarctic in the late ’40s, sent as a government researcher in order to investigate the impacts wolves were having on declining caribou populations. However, I’m led to believe from parallel reading that “true” may be more than…
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by Meša Selimović Taking place in eighteenth century Bosnia, Death and the Dervish follows Sheikh Ahmed Nuruddin as he attempts to navigate the corrupt Turkish bureaucracy to free his brother Harun from their city’s foreboding dungeon and almost certain death. Most of the story involves Nuruddin’s paralyzing internal conflict between his morals and cowardice, and…
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by Robert Frost Some poetry collections feel well ahead of their time when you’re in the midst of them. I remember being hit with this in the middle of Ezra Pound’s Cathay––that the author created something unique by moving away from rigidity within the poems but still maintaining a cohesive flow that came with inserting…
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Rubáiyát are tetrastichs, independent stanzas, each composed of four lines of near equal length. In their traditional form, all except the third line rhymes, though, occasionally, all lines of the verse rhyme. Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát are probably the most famous poems written in the form, though they were obscure in the Western world until Edward…
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by Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is Illuminated is autobiographical, but only a touch, only superficially. It’s about a character named Jonathan Safran Foer travelling to Ukraine with only an old picture to help him find a woman who may have helped save his grandfather from the Nazis. This much actually happened, but I understand that…
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by Gore Vidal In the final days of high school in small town Virginia, Jim Willard has a homosexual encounter with Bob Ford, and he falls for him hard. Unfortunately for Jim, this happens only days before Bob leaves to travel the world as a sailor. The City and the Pillar follows Jim’s journey in…
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by S. E. Hinton The Outsiders is S. E. Hinton’s popular and enduring story about class, friendship, and family, wrapped in a narrative about youth gang wars, presumably taking place in the ’50s or ’60s. Ponyboy and Johnny––both greasers, the lower-class gang––end up killing a Soc in self-defense. (Soc: short for “social,” so likely closer…
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by Jules Verne After discovering a coded note in an ancient book, Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, set out to an extinct volcano in Iceland said to hold a passage to the centre of the Earth. Along with their Icelandic guide, they embark on a voyage to a subterranean world filled with unknown…
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by Kenneth Grahame This one was really weird to me, and for a few different reasons. Firstly, The Wind in the Willows is another case of any synopsis I read failing to get to the heart of the story, partly because there are multiple storylines following different characters throughout, but also because the only one…
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