The Misanthrope, The Miser, and Other Plays
Molière was a seventeenth-century playwright and I have seen readers approach him with a comparable trepidation to which I’ve seen when high school students approach Shakespeare for the first time.
S. Hargrave
S. Hargrave is a Canadian writer and the book reviewer at Old Paper & Cats. Hargrave has a love of rare, antiquarian, and classic literature, works in translation, and cats.
They Hanged My Saintly Billy
When I saw Robert Graves’ They Hanged My Saintly Billy and realized that it was a novel about William Palmer case, I leapt at the chance to read it.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
The novel uses its single sentence in a way that makes it an accessible and compelling read. It goes to show that it’s important to see beyond the quirks and give even the weirdest sounding books a chance.
French Decadent Tales
I saw the Oxford World’s Classics French Decadent Tales sitting on my local independent bookstore’s shelf and I got so excited. French Decadence was a movement that did so much to further the form of the short story in general, but it also has all of those dark stories to tell at twilight that I can’t get enough of.
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is much maligned. Accused of being misogynist, homophobic, and other horrible things, it’s a book that many people have a very strong opinion about one way or another.
The Deputy
I think it’s probably immediately obvious why this play is controversial. It’s a bold statement about the actions (or, more accurately, lack of action) of an institution that would rather forget everything around the time period.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The reader is treated to scenes, vignettes, lush descriptions of the landscape and the culture. Sit back and enjoy it. If you’re waiting for the plot to carry you, it just isn’t going to happen — and that’s not what Berlin Alexanderplatz is trying to accomplish.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
In ‘8 Ball Bunny’, Bugs Bunny is trying to get a cute little Penguin back to the South Pole. At several points along the journey, a man I now recognize as Humphrey Bogart approaches Bugs and asks, “Can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” As an adult who has seen the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre several times, I laugh uproariously as this parody of the movie’s opening sequence.
Rumpole of the Bailey
Rumpole of the Bailey contains a critique not just of the British legal system, but also of society in the late 1970s, and the collision of the legal and political systems. Sometimes this commentary is insightful, yet sometimes it is cringe-worthy.
A Very Easy Death
What constitutes an easy death? Or a difficult one? Though her mother’s death was considered ‘easy’ by doctors, it still involved pain, suffering, and turmoil.