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...
Fiction
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“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 intricately explores the interplay between time, religion, and Native American identity through the powerful symbolism of water and rivers. This imagery serves as a profound reflection on the erosion of culture and the impact of modern American society on Native...
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...
The life and times of Joyce Carol Oates dynamically impact the short story, “Where You Are Going; Where Have You Been” in which music, myth and mores shape the social text corresponding with the 1960s. The 1965 rock song, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”...
Introduction The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a book narrated from the viewpoint of an intelligent young boy, Christopher, who is considered to be on the autism spectrum. The story takes place in Swindon, England, and London. Christopher’s perspective is unique,...
It takes a writer like Angela Carter to make connections between circus clowns and prostitutes. Her novel, Nights at the Circus, depicts both, and they are shown to be more similar than one might first imagine. In Nights at the Circus, Carter uses circuses and...
History is written by the victorious, the dominating nation, the ruling class, and subaltern voices are overpowered and unheard. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his The Postmodern Condition, critiques the historical master-narrative, the vision of history as a totalizing narrative schema that reflects a singular perspective: “I...
Novelist Ray Bradbury once said, “I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?” (“Ray Bradbury Quotes”). While speaking from a comical perspective,...
The events of 9/11 were a shock for not only the United States but also for the whole world. Suddenly, the country that was often perceived as impenetrable and unbeatable had to deal with the repercussions of a terrorist attack, shattering its masculine image (Carpenter...
In the story “Gryphon,” Charles Baxter fabricates a character that is not as perfect as we think she will be. Miss Ferenczi is a substitute teacher who came to Five Oaks Community to take over one of the teachers who has become ill until he...
In her essays “That Crafty Feeling,” “F. Kafka, Everyman,” and “The Rise of the Essay,” Zadie Smith writes about the universal experience of writing using her own personal experience as the standard writing experience. Smith completely blends together her personal experiences with more generalized statements...
In Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonists embark on a quest for order and meaning amid the chaos of modern America. While both novels illustrate the potential for meaninglessness within the chaotic landscape of contemporary life, West’s...
The 1950s brought about a multitude of changes in the culture of the United States: “conservative family values and morals were threatened as the decade came to a close” (Literature and Its Times). What was unthinkable in the 1940s gradually became the norm in the...
James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and “The Man Child” are both texts that demonstrate how the isolation of characters can yield overtly violent outcomes. Though the perspective from which Baldwin challenges dominant forces differs between the two texts, the race of the protagonists...
In the chapter “Go Down, Matthew” of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, speaking to an ex-priest at the Cafe de la Mairie du Vie after an extensive and exhausting session of consoling a lamenting Nora Flood, relates himself and the ex-priest to ducks...
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.
