Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Most old books are written by men. These books were written by women.
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.
While The Only Problem thankfully took a lot less time to read than Anna Hastings, I didn’t like it all that much. On the whole, I found it a novel that was just very un-Muriel-Spark.
A collection of shorter pieces, and longer prose, all of the writing is connected by Babitz’s love for Southern California’s most famous city and its environs.
This week I’m going to review two McNally selections from earlier this year, both of which are delightful non-fiction reads that I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen off the shelf.
