Okay, so I once tweeted that any Faulkner novel was most certainly pretentious artwank at its finest but, in fact, I secretly quite like Faulkner’s novels. Specifically, I quite like As I Lay Dying, first published in 1930. (I am cursing that I do not live in New York because James Franco—*swoons, suppresses inner fangirl*—has…
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Considering that Bloomsday is imminent (16th June), I thought it might be appropriate to produce a short piece of writing on one of my favourite short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners: “The Dead”. It is a story mesmerising in its beauty; its recreation of reality profound. It is, in the minds of many, one of the greatest works of…
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First published in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the sort of book I like to read at nighttime, under a blanket, with only a torch to light up the words on the page. The novella devolves upon the story of Dr Jekyll, a middle class…
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I imagine being the “crème de la crème” sounds tantalisingly delicious to children of an impressionable age. For one, foreign words to young ears always sound exotic and important, for another, it is the sort of phrase likely to be picked up from an adult, and most children wish to be older than they are,…
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The Member of the Wedding (1946) is a tale of the search for belonging, played out against the individual struggle of adolescence, and the larger catastrophe of World War II. Frankie Adams is a lanky twelve year-old girl, desperate to find a group to belong to. She becomes fixated with the idea of joining her…
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Before there was 50 Shades of Grey, there was Lace. Not that I’ve read 50 Shades (an admission which ironically undermines my status as a reviewer), but you think BDSM is shocking? Shirley Conran, author of Lace, describes it as ‘baby porn’. She shocked everyone with Lace, it’s frank discussions and depictions of sex (from…
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Sylvia Plath is a bit of a feminist icon. In her book The Bell Jar, there are plenty of hints as to why that might be. Set in the 1950s, Esther Greenwood, the narrator, is an ambitious character, smart and well-educated. She professes to never wanting to marry because she didn’t much like the idea…
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