The Really Long List of Great Literature (cont'd)

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

If we have to pick one aspect that might make Buddenbrooks the first important novel of the twentieth century, it could be its moral ambiguity. The story of the Buddenbrook family is told over four generations.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

First thing you have to do is forget all the movie and television productions you might have seen of this tale. Those misty, moody scenes on the moors.... The horror of the hound from hell, eyes blazing as it attacks.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

"The Monkey's Paw" is a story so well known for its plot that its writing and style are sometimes forgotten. In fact, it seems not to have been written by anyone at all, but must have filtered down to us as folk tale or.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Samuel Butler never published The Way of All Flesh in his lifetime, being unsatisfied with it. I can understand why he might have wanted to rework it. The story is skimpy, again being sandwiched among pages and chapters.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

With a few exceptions, I dislike the kind of horror and fantasy that's in your face—tales that start with incredible, supernatural phenomena and then keep building on it, getting wilder and wilder. It just seems...well.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Joseph Conrad's novel of a century earlier was apparently widely read again, especially in Western intelligence circles. I'm not sure, though, what those new readers.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you come to G.K. Chesterton's avowed masterpiece expecting a piece of early twentieth-century realism, you're going to be very surprised. If you've heard it's a mystery—hopefully along the lines of the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

The Innocence of Father Brown is the first of five collections of mystery stories featuring G.K. Chesterton's canny priest. It's probably the best collection and it introduces the holy detective—as well as his sometime.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

At least one reprint edition of Under Western Eyes is decorated with nautical graphics, as someone must have thought befitting a Joseph Conrad yarn. Not realizing, of course, this is a Conrad story unlike almost any other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Stephen Leacock gets compared to Mark Twain all the time, which means people like me have to keep pointing out how different he is. We have to keep pointing to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and showing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The argument over Death in Venice is usually about whether the theme is homosexual desire. Which is too bad really. When I first read Thomas Mann's short novel as a young man myself, I was adamant.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • At the movies • Buy

Dubliners is a wonderful collection of stories you can go back to at different times in your life and appreciate on different levels each time. They were written and published before James Joyce got sidetracked by his.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

There is not a lot to say about the narrative structure or the characters or the writing in this famous novel. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a seminal tale of intrigue, a classic early story of an innocent man drawn into dark.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I really wanted to love this book. It's one of the sharpest indictments of war ever written in fictional form, a groundbreaking work by a sincere, progressive author. But I found I cannot love it as a whole. I can only like it.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I love the way this novel starts. If you're doing a biographical story, why not start at the very beginning with the perceptions of an infant? Well, baby tuckoo grows up quickly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and becomes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It doesn't sound promising. Like one of those dreary, early Canadian novels some of us had to read in school about settlers in rural North America. Immigrants set up house and farm in the new land, discover the country is harsh, the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Eliot's masterwork? The poetic masterpiece of the twentieth century? Here's the problem I have with that: I don't like reading The Waste Land. It's hard. Lines in foreign languages. References to classical literature.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I've read Ulysses five times. It's not that I love it so much. It may be because I've heard so often this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Or perhaps because it's so difficult, I figured I had to keep reading it until I got it.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you wonder how Katherine Mansfield who published so little could have such a wide influence on modern writing, spend some time with this collection. Reading The Garden Party and Other Stories is like perusing.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Scott Fitzgerald's prolific output of stories for magazines early in his career was distinguished by at least one that was undoubtedly great, many that could be called interesting, and more that are best forgotten.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

All the important elements of Eliot's longer, more difficult poem The Waste Land are in "The Hollow Men". The view of this world as insubstantial, a realm for the living dead. The attempts to revive religious concepts, to offer.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Partway though a rereading of Mrs Dalloway a sudden idea threatened to upset everything I had ever thought about the author. Was it possible Virginia Woolf was really making fun of her insufferably effete lead characters.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Unbelievably, few people read The Great Gatsby when it was first published. In the roaring Twenties, its questioning of the American Dream may not have been welcome. Other American writers, like Sinclair Lewis.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It may seem perverse to pick In Our Time as Ernest Hemingway's greatest story collection because many individual stories in later collections have become more familiar—and are arguably more accomplished than these earlier.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's an irony that the first successful novel by the writer often accused of being mindlessly ballsy features a hero without a penis. Jake Barnes had it shot off in the war, a tragedy that prevents him and the woman who....Critique • Quotes • Buy

This novel hasn't a single character one is likely to care about. Normally this would be the death knell for a piece of fiction. But somehow To the Lighthouse won immediate acclaim upon publication in 1925 and has ever since.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Death Comes for the Archbishop is often considered Willa Cather's masterpiece and is on several lists as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century—which may be surprising if you read it alongside other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

When they got around to making the movie of Elmer Gantry—more than three decades after the novel came out—they still felt compelled to preface it with a warning: We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's the ultimate novel of ideas. A book of characters who spend most of their time spouting thoughts on big topics like love, religion, science, politics and sex. That is, when they're not engaging in the latter. In the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All Quiet on the Western Front is the kind of book you've heard about forever as a Great Book, one you've always meant to read some day, and yet it sounds so heavy and depressing and so...so worthwhile...that.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A Farewell to Arms has been called the best American novel to come out of World War I. That could be accurate. I can think of few other American novels that are even contenders, though I can also think of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Critics find in William Faulkner's story, "A Rose for Emily", an allegory about the American South living in the past, decades after the Civil War, still holding on to the dreams of a supposed former glory, morbidly embracing.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Everyone who loves classic film noir knows the complicated storyline from the 1941 flick starring Humphrey Bogart. The Maltese Falcon involves intrigue among shady, eccentric characters to find a black bird made of gold.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Pearl S. Buck has sometimes been accused of stereotyping the Chinese peasants as noble, simple creatures. But this was hardly the reaction to The Good Earth in the early 1930s when it became a sensation in the West and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A lot of mystery novels don't stand up to repeated readings. Makes sense. Once you know the ending—once the mystery has been solved—the tension in the slow buildup to the conclusion is dissipated. Plot holes.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

What a debut. The Postman Always Rings Twice was James M. Cain's first novel, published relatively late in life for a writer, when he was in his forties. But already his writing is as tight and intense as any work of the past.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A tip for reading Tender Is the Night. Don't try it right after The Great Gatsby, even though it was Scott Fitzgerald's next novel. If you do, you'll be disappointed. The tight writing of Gatsby—with its unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you've read or heard about Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled detective fiction, you may not be prepared for what you'll find in The Thin Man. Sure, there's a somewhat jaded private eye, one Nick Charles, as well as a..... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Appointment in Samarra is about as perfectly structured and written a novel of American social critique as you could find in the first half of the twentieth century—up there with Babbitt and The Great Gatsby. True.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Either of the two other major story collections published during Lu Hsun's life—Wandering or Call to Arms— could have been chosen to spotlight. They're all great. But the most important piece in those two volumes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Murder in the Cathedral is not much of a play. Only two acts with an interlude—a sermon really—between them. Not much stage action: England's archbishop, Thomas Becket, returns to the country in spite of the opposition.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

British mystery authors like to place their imagined crimes in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities. Maybe they hope uncovering wickedness in the English and classics departments distinguishes their.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The short story "The Doctor's Son" could alone carry John O'Hara's reputation as a story writer. Conversely the collection in which it appears, his first book of short stories, is not enough to give justice to his reputation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Why critics think Eyeless in Gaza is Aldous Huxley's greatest novel: It's very long. It's his most difficult novel, using a fractured timeline, so we follow several narratives that occur during Anthony Beavis's life almost simultaneously and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It might be considered Ernest Hemingway's greatest story, if not for the greater popularity of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", with which it is often paired. Both "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's not the story I would pick as Ernest Hemingway's best. I have a thing against writers writing about being writers, particularly writers writing about being writers being unable to write. But "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It has always seemed like the perfect American novella. A poignant and disturbing story told effortlessly, of simple folks on the fringe of society who turn out to be quite complex. But read Of Mice and Men a second.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

On the early covers of Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, a small community is shown perched on the side of a lofty hill or mountain, giving the illustration a kind of aspirational feeling. What isn't immediately clear.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Despite issues with objectionable titling over the years, And Then There were None has been not only the most popular novel by Agatha Christie during her long, prolific career, but one of the best-selling books of all time.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

"Science split the atom and Joyce split the word." This summary of progress in the first half of the twentieth century has often been stated in reference to Finnegans Wake. James Joyce chops up words and fuses syllables.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

My comments upon first reading Raymond Chandler's famous detective novel, The Big Sleep, were all about how sparse and direct his prose was. Just the facts. Plain, chiselled sentences à la Hemingway and Hammett.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

What may be most surprising about Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes is it's such an absorbing piece of drama despite being about a business deal. The Hubbard siblings—brothers Oscar and Ben and sister Regina.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck's most controversial work, seeming to advocate a socialist revolution to end the misery of the dispossessed folks during the dirty nineteen-thirties. It can only be this apparent political.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Darkness at Noon was not quite what I had expected, based on what I had heard. Fans and critics had described it as presenting the ordeal of an innocent man charged during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Torture.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

For me this is the big Hemingway book—his greatest work and one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And it is a big book, his longest. But For Whom the Bell Tolls does not read as long. Partly.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If your exposure to James M. Cain was his popular short novels, like The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity and their movies, or if it came via the 1945 Joan Crawford film adaptation of this book.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The books that became cult—and counterculture—favourites in the iconoclastic 1960s and early 1970s can be divided into two categories: 1. Those that were written during and for that period, such as Stranger in a.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

Animal Farm is a work I include on the list of greatest works under protest. It's not that I dislike George Orwell. I like most of his work very much. Nor do I consider Animal Farm particularly bad. It's very cleverly done for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited? An account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonism. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely Catholic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

In the world of science fiction publishing and fandom, A.E. van Vogt's first novel is widely considered his best. It is also in many ways typical of his entire output. Slan first appeared, like almost every van Vogt work.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

By rights, there should be little interest remaining in Graham Greene's 1948 story of a white colonialist policeman, wracked with guilt over his lapsed Catholicism, corruption, career failures and duplicitous relationships.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

This was hailed by Time as the best novel about the Second World War. And for once, Time might have had it right. If we add the qualifier "American" between "best" and "novel". I was surprised in reading Norman.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It takes Nevil Shute a long time in this novel to get to the town of Alice (Alice Springs actually), and even longer to get to the town like Alice. The building of a new town in Australia is only a minor part of A Town Like Alice.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

How strange that the most affecting characters Asimov ever created were robots. Perhaps it's the same phenomenon we find in film and television dramas in which synthetic creatures like Frankenstein's monster and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Few novels divide readers as The Catcher in the Rye does. This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, since J.D. Salinger's novel has been wildly popular since it came out in 1951. It's been lauded as changing the course of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the 1980s Isaac Asimov reread the Foundation stories he had written in the 1940s and had compiled as a trilogy of books in the 1950s, and he was appalled. The stories had no action, no suspense, no romance—they were.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A lot has been said about Hemingway's ideals of courage, grace under pressure, and all that. My own feeling is that what he really wanted was to be considered wise. His lead characters usually have a stillness about them.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Is it all timshel? Steinbeck has his main character drop the word at the end of the novel. Earlier it had been explained that the Hebrew word from the Bible meant that humankind may or may not triumph over evil, that we're.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Anyone reading The Demolished Man for the first time today may enjoy it as a kind of typical science fiction thriller—a cat-and-mouse game between cop and criminal, set in the future. A Sleuth-style battle taking place....Critique • Quotes • Buy

It may seem Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is becoming less relevant these days, as hard-copy books are at risk of disappearing, pushed aside by digital communications. Without paper media, warnings about.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Chandler's longest novel is also his most praised. Which makes me wonder whether it's the length the critics are praising. Or if maybe they think it must be deep since it's so long. Is The Long Goodbye long because.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Critics may not have known what to make of it when it came out in 1954, but what has been made of I Am Legend since then has been several fields of popular fiction, multiple movie adaptations, lots of knockoffs, and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American as a novel may be Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Lolita is the kind of book that grows thicker each time you read it. The first time you may race through the novel to take in the plot of the man who loves and loses a preadolescent girl, what he calls a "nymphet". More.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Some writers mythologize, raising everyday life to levels of cosmic significance, finding awful natural cycles in happenstance, wisdom in emotional upheaval. Others de-mythologize, undercutting pretension, revealing.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Stars My Destination has often been called one of science fiction's greatest works, sometimes the greatest. Yet, the first time I read it, I didn't get the fuss. The novel was supposed to feature an unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's interesting and odd that On the Beach and On the Road came out the same year. Both are dated 1957, but how very different they are. Only the accident of their titles being sequential in an alphabetical list could make.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

On the Road is the easiest novel to find "great lines" in. Open to any page. Jack Kerouac's writing is at such a consistent intensity that important, poetic, rhythmic, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Big Front Yard is a story Mark Twain might have produced if he were writing in the science fiction era. It's a far-fetched tale in a smalltown setting, featuring a fast-talking entrepreneur who faces with slyly cynical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It starts as a simple case for a rich old family, as many fictional P.I. cases seem to. Rich old Mrs. Galton wants to find out what happened to her son, whom she has not seen in twenty years—not since he disappeared with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

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Anyone reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time may be surprised to find it is not entirely about racism. The trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, on a spurious charge of rape, for which the novel.... Critique • Quotes • Quotes • Buy

John Updike is most known for Rabbit, Run but it's not his best or best-reviewed novel. It's not even his best or best-reviewed novel in the book series it kicks off. That would be the sequel, Rabbit Redux, the one critics.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Stranger in a Strange Land may be an old favourite of many readers who were first exposed to it in their youth, but the time may have come to drop it from the list of great novels. It has certainly lost the cult status.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Whenever he was told he's never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Joseph Heller was tempted to reply, "Who has?" A bit of hyperbole. There are plenty of modern novels as good as, or better than, Catch-22.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Around the time of this novel, Philip K. Dick was being heralded as the next scifi writer to break into mainstream popularity after Kurt Vonnegut. The Man in the High Castle won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you like straightforward story-telling with characters well fleshed out, in a book you can put down and pick up later to continue without losing the thread—then you're going to hate The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Dune's timing was perfect. Launched in the mid-sixties around the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Frank Herbert's ecology-conscious science fiction novel and its many sequels and adaptations.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If The Crystal World were a typical science fiction novel about an impending global disaster, it'd have scientists and military heroes working against the clock trying to stop the apocalypse. In J.G. Ballard's world....Critique • Quotes • Buy

The novel Make Room! Make Room! was published right in the middle of the boom in warnings about overpopulation and depletion of resources in the 1960s and early 1970s. It actually preceded a number of more famous.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has much—maybe too much—to appeal to followers of all Robert Heinlein's diverse interests. For science fiction fans, with an emphasis on science, it suggests interesting ideas for how a colony.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If you've heard that the highlight of 1967 was the Summer of Love, check out The Armies of the Night to discover the famous summer was followed by the Autumn of Confrontation. At least in the United States.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. But, unlike many science fiction writers, Ursula K. Le Guin doesn't lay it all out for you in comic-book-style exposition. Rather, like a serious mainstream author.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It was one of the naughtier books—but not the naughtiest—in a long line of books that scandalized some and enticed many more in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even if you never read Portnoy's Complaint then, you'd heard.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Larry Niven's popular novel has dated in the five-plus decades it's been around—though you can still find plenty of hard science fiction fans who consider it a modern classic. Ringworld arose from a certain tradition in.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Writers are commonly asked by editors to cut their introductory passages and start their narratives in the midst of the action—in media res for the learned among us. For John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series I might have.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers. As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy