Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
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.
Garner is one of those writers that I wish more people had read. I love her writing style, and her clever economy of words that provides the reader enough room to think carefully about every sentence and every turn of phrase.
Johnson does not pull any punches as he examines the lives of societies various down-and-outs.
There is nearly literally something for everyone, but at the same time the narrative doesn’t feel busy or chaotic. Instead, Kennedy encapsulates the complexity of mid-century modern life from a vast number of perspectives.
I’ve decided to review two of Didion’s works (partially because they have been waiting in my to-review stacks for a while, and partially because this is post #222).
Memoirs are tricky sometimes. I only read them when I either am interested in the time period or they focus on something that I read in a literary context.
Unlike most short story collections, In Transit is a work that I would recommend considering as a whole. Though the stories were published separately and years apart, they share a very similar theme. All of them are about being lost in time, lost in space, and lost somewhere far from home.
Van Dyke seeks to explore racism as it exists in obvious, vocally expressed prejudice but also how it can be insidiously lurking below the surface of even some acts of seeming kindness. This writer excels at character study and exploration of human relationships, which definitely keeps you turning pages at an astounding rate.
The thing I wish I had known about this book before I read it? That the narrator is not supposed to be likeable. In fact, the narrator is supposed to evoke anger in the reader more so than any kind of pity.
There are many reasons you should read this book, the primary one being that this novel became one of the first to successfully and comprehensively discuss systemic racism and how it affects Black youth and the Black population in general.
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone was not well-received when it was published and was compared unfavourably to Baldwin’s earlier work. Now there is a push to go back to it and appreciate it for the excellent book it is.
