The Outcast and the Rite
I’ve gleefully noticed that for the last two or three years there’s been an emphasis on the forgotten women writers of weird fiction. It soothes a sore spot in my child-self.
20th Century
20th Century works were written between 1900 and 1999.
These books are the ones most current readers will recognized. The modern novel has been fully developed and fiction has been separated into categories and genre. The 20th century is the root of recent history. It includes events such as suffrage, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War.
Beginning with the Edwardian Era and the Modernist movement, these years explore experiments with form and structure. Post-War and Interwar fiction is often featured in reviews.
If you’re looking for post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-post-modernism, or any very recent movement, you will find those listed under contemporary works.
You are viewing 20th Century reviews.
You can view all other eras/movements, or you can search by language/region, genre, editor/translator, book authors, or year of edition.
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.
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.
Confessions of a Mask
As the book continues, the narrator becomes less and less reliable and also less sure of himself and what he is capable of. Desires, thoughts, and feelings pull Kochan apart with a slow intensity.