Latest Blog Posts for BOOKISH

• THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson
  on Dec 4, 2016
  This book, written in 1959, is apparently a famous progenitor of the modern supernatural thriller. Shirley Jackson is well know as the literary mother of Steven King. The story begins with an elderly scientist who invites a group of people to come t...
• THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
  on Dec 3, 2016
  I don't really know what was going on in the 1930s in Europe, but damn, the literature of that period is tortured. And it's not tortured in some kind of physical, comprehensible way; their worries are all very non-physical, or metaphysical, or someth...
• NOW IN NOVEMBER by Josephine Johnson
  on Aug 27, 2016
  This won the Pulitzer in 1934, when the author was 24. It was her first novel. Can you imagine? I haven’t read any of her other eleven novels, but I think we can rest assured that the rest of her writing life was basically one long case of that...
• FATHERS AND SON by Ivan Turgenev
  on Aug 21, 2016
  I went to an exhibit recently about 19th century Russian portraiture, and suddenly found a great gap looming in my knowledge of the western cannon. In the same breath as Tolstoy and Dostoevesky, the captions spoke of someone called Turgenev. Who is...
• THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER by Goethe
  on Aug 14, 2016
  I have been avoiding this brief novel for years. I am not really sure why. It just sounds sort of stupid. Famously, the novel was a huge success in 18th century Europe, igniting a fashion for yellow waistcoats, and setting off the first recorded w...
• MY SON, MY SON by Howard Spring
  on Aug 14, 2016
  This is a novel about a man who is seriously hung up on his son. Set in the early part of the twentieth century, it's an interesting window into the pre-Wars world, and reminds me how extraordinarily lucky I am to be born now rather than then. Obvi...
• NEW GRUB STREET by George Gissing
  on Jul 16, 2016
  This is a book about struggling young artists, and in my opinion it is totally authentic, because it's main focus is on money. Not, obviously, on having money, but on not having it. It's probably the most money-focused book I've ever read; far more...
• A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara
  on Jun 5, 2016
  This novel drips shortlists and rave reviews from quality papers, and probably deserves them all. It starts off as a story of four friends from college all trying to make it, mostly in the arts. This was my favourite part of the novel, capturing ea...
• GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
  on Jun 4, 2016
  Of this novel, his first, Baldwin said "MOUNTAIN is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father."And he certainly odes deal with his father. Big time. The...
• THE CHRYSALIDS by John Wyndham
  on May 21, 2016
  John Wyndham is famous for DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, a terrific novel that if you haven't read you ought to. It's about alien plants aiming to take over the world: you know you want to. I've been thinking about it often this spring, because frankly all...

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