Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Most old books are written by men. These books were written by women.
It is essentially Nadezhda’s account of her own suffering and her country’s under the murderous, oppressive force of a dictator’s relentless purges of all opposition. Of art and culture. Of intellectuals and anyone who got in his way or was inconvenient.
The volumes are compact and beautiful, and look great on the shelf — plus the collections are both thorough and accessible for someone who doesn’t read as much poetry as literature.
The Cipher is an interesting story that uses extreme violence to help the narrative. It doesn’t become the narrative.
The thing I love most about Jackson’s short stories is the way that she twists seemingly ordinary events into strange and unsettling directions. You won’t find ghouls and goblins here, but you will find human monsters and ominous atmospheres that leave the reader wondering how things went so wrong and why.
Elisabeth is supposedly fully invested in the GDR and stubbornly sees it as the way to some kind of utopian realization of equality for all. However, her doubts have started to creep in.
Dark academia has become a much-talked-about off-shoot of the spookier genres, and I would say that label fits Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Even the whitest of picket fences can hide a twisting darkness. And that very pressure could itself serve as one of the most complex themes of noir — that of dreams deferred and decisions made with extreme regret.
As the 1960s began to fade into the 1970s, noir took a fascinating and complex turn. It wasn’t enough to just be about a crime — now it was about being relevant to the current moment.
Readers begin to ask the question — what happens when your job is crime? What happens when people decide to make money ‘the easy way’?
Here we are moving away from looming dread of war and toward the disillusionment of what was waiting for those that returned from overseas.
