by Kurt Vonnegut After taking control of the Rosewater Foundation, Eliot Rosewater dedicates his time and the copious amounts of money in his trust to helping average Americans, no strings attached. Some people––including his father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater, the man who started the Foundation as a way to prevent tax collectors from getting at…
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by Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Schweik is said to be one of the most famous pieces of Czech literature that exists, if not the most famous. It’s at least the most widely-translated and far-reaching novel to come out of the region, with lasting influences on language and culture in the Czech Republic and elsewhere….
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by Kurt Vonnegut I don’t think I can fully express how important this book is to me. The first time I read Breakfast of Champions was sometime around ’07 or ’08, when I was an impressionable University student building up my knowledge in areas unrelated to literature of this sort. And it seriously blew my…
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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 Sean Penn Well, this one’s awkward. Awkward’s probably the best way to describe it succinctly, anyway, and here I thought I’d be leaning more toward “weird” after reading what it’s about. By day, Bob Honey’s a septic tank salesman whose business savvy apparently allowed him to corner the Jehovah’s Witness slice of that market….
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by Voltaire Candide follows its titular character through trials and tribulations that take him around the globe in pursuit of Cunégonde, the woman he loves. At a young age, his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, instilled an understanding in Candide of the concept of Optimism, or a universal good in the world, and the young man takes…
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by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell The Room is a bad movie, but it’s more than that. It’s a special kind of bad, an elite kind of bad, described as a modern Plan 9 from Outer Space or the Citizen Kane of bad movies––the kind of bad movie with a lasting legacy. The Disaster Artist…
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by Terry Fallis After five demoralizing years in Canadian politics, Daniel Addison decides to quit his job as speechwriter to the leader of the Opposition Liberals to start teaching English at the University of Ottawa. (The decision came shortly after unintentionally witnessing his girlfriend’s late-night “political discourse” with the House Leader.) But, as a last…
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by Thomas Pynchon Pynchon is another author I’ve been meaning to read for a long time now. Though I probably should have asked around before picking up the only novel of his I recognized by title, that “Alex luck” I seem accustomed to caused that same book to be what is widely considered one of…
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by P. G. Wodehouse In Something Fresh, the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle unintentionally walks off with the prized scarab from the collection of the American billionaire, J. Preston Peters. Though Peters wants it back, he doesn’t want to cause a scandal by accusing Emsworth of theft. For, not only did Emsworth, finding the…
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