Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
here are a lot of great and very notable essays in here — ‘What White Publishers Won’t Print’, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’, and ‘I Saw Negro Votes Peddled’. However, when discussing Hurston’s work, it is only appropriate to note that she is not the easiest author to read.
Ellison’s use of language to create complex tapestries of themes and concepts is hard to put into words, both because his style is so unique and because his skill is so profound.
he doesn’t shy away from what happened to her, but neither does she use it to shock the reader. Instead, she writes of the horror with blunt honesty, and brutality tempered with careful sentence level consideration and a language that is powerful, yet never gratuitous.
We happened across Raoul Peck’s film I Am Not Your Negro one February night while flipping through the channels. TVO was airing it as part of its yearly Black History Month’s selections. It’s a film that I would not hesitate to name as essential, and it’s what was responsible for my introduction to James Baldwin’s work.
Each novel is a different exploration and comment on Irish culture, but each is written in a style that is uniquely O’Brien’s. He has a talent for bitter, scathing satire that sits in the midst of light, often comic prose.
Her style is simple and direct. It speaks to the reader in a very distinct way. When you read her prose, it’s like Didion is sitting across from you in a sitting room late at night, talking about things that people often find difficult to speak about.
If you haven’t heard of James M. Cain, you’ve most certainly heard of the films based on his work. Cain is a master at creating a feeling of disgusted disillusionment in his many horrible and fractured characters.
Looking at this book as being about a generation as whole is not really the way to get a complete picture of it nor of the statement it makes.
The Setting Sun presents a Japan that has lost its sense of identity as its population tries to pick up the pieces after the end of the second world war. It is a setting that has the sense of being in flux, but not in a positive way.
The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories sticks to a formula that’s pretty hard to get wrong. They take a theme and collect a bunch of stories from classic authors to compose an anthology.
