But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes… Read More ›
Literary Critique
Dystopia in Lord of the Flies
1.0 Introduction William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is reminiscent of his predecessors, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Ballantyne’s The Coral Island in his situating the action on an uninhabited tropical island. Unlike his predecessors, however, Golding does not explore… Read More ›
Greek Mythology in the Spotlight: Circe by Madeline Miller, A Book Review
‘Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.’ In her novel Circe, nominated this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Miller takes this premise and… Read More ›
Indie Review: In the Sun by Mixie Plum
In her beautifully written novella, strewn with numerous references to literature, music, and pop culture that allow readers to immerse themselves into the protagonist’s universe, the author Mixie Plum takes her readers on an emotional roller coaster, from laugh-out-loud highs… Read More ›
What is a Human Woman? – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
As Elizabethan literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney claims in his 16th century work titled The Defence of Poesie, the purpose of poetry, later extended to encompass all literary genres, is to simultaneously teach and delight the reader. Gail Honeyman’s debut… Read More ›
The Forgetful Narrator: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
The idea of a completely reliable narrator is quite a questionable subject, since we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories, hence, as the term ‘omniscient’ suggests, the reliable narrator must be some kind of divine,… Read More ›
The Addled Narrator: A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window
After I’d completed A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, I put the book down in my lap, leaned back, and stared somewhere into the middle distance while my mind went through the events in the novel once again, weighing… Read More ›
Eine kleine Nachtmusik: Ishiguro’s Nocturnes
It is oft said that even the best of novelists hone their skills on short stories since they contain more or less the same elements as novels yet on a smaller scale. Kazuo Ishiguro’s charming collection titled Nocturnes: Five Stories… Read More ›
Ready Player One – A Dystopian Cliché?
Ernest Cline’s highly popular novel, Ready Player One, has been widely acclaimed for its originality and deep immersion into the 1980s, the decade when the video-gaming as we know it today set root in the form of hugely popular video… Read More ›
The Muse: Burton and Barthes
Jessie Burton again turns to the past to harness inspiration for her second book, The Muse. This time the plot moves back and forth between the 1930s civil-war-ravaged Spain and the 1960s London, yet the issue at hand is not… Read More ›
