Throughout Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 masterpiece Midaq Alley, the alley’s microcosmic nature turns its powerfully crafted characters into living renditions of sin. More specifically, Mahfouz creates characters to represent the Christian church’s Seven Deadly Sins, with almost each and every character fitting perfectly into a respective...
Haruki Murakami, Japanese author of The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, has many characters who all have influential aspects on the protagonist Toru Okada. But one particular character, May Kasahara, is one minor character who has a critical effect on the unfolding of the protagonist throughout...
Fiction
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The Good Country People story by Flannery O’Connor is a psychological drama that leaves a message to the reader about not to judge people for how they look and/or how they behave in a certain situation. The characters like Joy, Mrs. Hopewell, and Manley Pointer...
Written in 1983, Njabulo Ndebele’s “Fools & Other Stories” deals with the experiences of ordinary people living under the apartheid regime. The author subtly comments on the political environment of the 1980s through the lives of average black citizens whom the apartheid system affects. Ndebele’s...
Edith Wharton is perhaps the most preeminent female Gothic writer in all of American history. What made her career so unique, besides the fact that she was a woman in a traditionally male dominated field, was that she was not writing for money, fame, or...
The Tin Flute by Gabriel Roy is a Canadian fiction set up in the early 1940’s during the Second World War when Canada was going through the great depression. The book revolves around characters who strive to find romance, alleviate poverty and overcome ignorance amidst...
“‘Nothing?’ said Mama piercingly, ‘Nothing to come home to?’ She gave me a short glance full of meaning. I had, after all, come home, even husbandless, childless, driving a fall-apart car” (Erdrich, 13). Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized...
Time surges relentlessly, uncontrollably, and all too irrevocably for Buddy Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” Ever since his older brother Seymour’s death, Buddy has struggled to piece together the fragments of his existence, the diary entries,...
Introduction When I first started reading this book, I found it challenging to understand because of its unique writing style. The author of Cat’s Cradle divided the book into 127 chapters, with each chapter’s title being significant to the paragraphs within it. This book was...
A House for Mr. Biswas, written by V.S. Naipaul, is an epic that tells the story of Mohun Biswas, a poor boy believed to be a bad omen from birth, and his life in Trinidad. The life of Mr. Biswas is presented in the form...
Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Midaq Alley, is a story about a group of people living in an alley in Egypt in the 1940’s. Already, from that description, the reader can see that the women of this tale have a significant disadvantage in equality. Surprisingly enough, the...
Most people do not focus on the writing style of a novel and tend to pay more attention to the broader contours of the story line. When reading Gary Schmidt’s Trouble, the reader should pay attention to writing style because it is different from most...
Does anyone know what a political cartoonist is? Its literal job description is to enhance a character flaw usually of a politician or the stupidity of a political event by drawing it larger. In other words, a political cartoonist job is to point out people’s...
Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners depicts three separate stories based on historical facts and accounts of three Black men living in Great Britain at different times. Their lives, though not literally intertwined, greatly inform one another due to what substance Phillips’s writing highlights in each. The titular...
“My Sainted Aunts”, written by Bulbul Sharma, is an Indian book built upon several stories with unique characters, each one of them presented with great diction and characterization. Furthermore, the author decides to use and portray Indian lifestyle for women before modern times, where these...
In The Cider House Rules, Homer, the protagonist, after stifling all of the uncomfortable situations in his life would “lay awake [at night] because the phantoms of those days were not gone” (312). While Homer liked to think that he was in control of his...
Lulu Nanapush Lamartine is a symbolic and admirable Chippewa Woman in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. As a Native Woman character, Lulu reclaims and redefines space that is usually taken up by unfair stereotypes by using her shameless beauty and compassionate sexuality. Margaret Galloway argues that...
Although Junior in Salvage the Bones is only 10 years old, his character not only is complicated but also provides complexity to the rest of Ward’s novel. His birth resulted in the death of Mama, which leaves the rest of the family motherless and alone...
The Devil Take Tomorrow by Gretchen Jeannette is a historical fiction set in the American Revolutionary War era. Anyone interested in history, espionage, and romance would enjoy this fast-paced novel. I for one love it when a book delivers on an action-packed storyline and is...
Written by J.L Carr, A Month in the Country focuses on the story of Tom Birkin; a veteran of World War I who, after his wife leaves him, takes a job to restore a medieval painting in the church of a small village in Yorkshire...
Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy illustrates in beautiful and haunting prose the oppression black citizens of South Africa faced in the years preceding apartheid. The country’s white minority imposed its power over black South Africans in several ways, the most significant of which are succinctly listed...
Underground Airlines traverses many social and political climates, namely, the tension that exists between privileged whites and oppressed blacks. While Ben Winters’ novel is set in an imagined future where institutionalized slavery still thrives in the South, the novel points toward the systematic oppression that...
Richard Price is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, writing his first novel The Wanderers while he was attending Columbia University. After this impressive debut he wrote several more novels in quick succession including Bloodbrothers, Ladies’ Man, and The Breaks. The Breaks, written in 1983, was...
Many people look down upon the poor. For these disdainful individuals, being poor means that you have to perform acts that would be reprimanded by others, therefore ruining your social image. It is possible, however, to disagree with anyone who thinks that. Hunger is a...
Tadeusz Borowski is an inherently tragic author. His life as a guard in a German concentration camp is something to be pitied at best. While Borowski writes about his horrible experiences as a guard in his collection of short stories This Way for the Gas,...
Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine conveys the state of Native American life in today’s society. Her symbolism stands out to me above all else in the book. While Erdrich uses many symbols and motifs, the most poignant is her water and river imagery and the...
Throughout Savage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward places considerable emphasis on growth and change within Esch — whether the multiple descriptions of Esch’s pregnant belly, or how she sees herself as a fighter who breaks the stereotypical male-female dynamic by becoming the stronger, more mature party...
Introduction Lu Xun (1881-1936), a leading figure in the modern literature, had a great impact on the New Culture Movement between the 1910s and 1920s. He published numerous works like short stories, essays, and poems. His essays often contain socialist ideas in order to persuade...
In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left doubting nearly everything they have...
With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West’s ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ works on three separate yet interrelated symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, people, and events in a particular scene are representative of one small symptom of the overall weariness...
Fiction is an integral part of literature, a kind of art of the word that describes reality in artistic images. It is a collection of written and printed works of certain people, eras, and humanity. In its narrowest sense, fiction refers to written prose narratives, and often specifically to novels, as well as novellas and short stories.
