![]() ![]() ![]() The genially erudite ironies that have served its author so well with topics from travel to architecture can feel a bit too glib here. Indeed, this book can sound too cool for its own good. His urbane, rather Voltairean scrutiny examines how the practice of faith – with most examples from Christianity, several from Judaism and a few from Buddhism – has helped weak-willed humans cope with "the crises and griefs of finite existence on a troubled planet". I suspect that De Botton's tone grates even more than his content. ![]() And strong personalities within liberal Anglicanism (with counterparts in reform Judaism) held out a friendly hand from the side of the faithful. It moulded my childhood, certainly: we didn't really go to church but we did go to churches, with the sacred volumes of Pevsner's Buildings of England lodged in the glove box of the car. This experience, of emotional affinity shorn of any doctrinal attachment, spanned several generations. In whose blent air all our compulsions meet". This aching nostalgia for an impossible faith and its masterworks has itself left some fine monuments, from Matthew Arnold in the 1860s listening to the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the ebbing "Sea of Faith" on "Dover Beach", to Philip Larkin, "Church Going" as a respectful sceptic to "A serious house on serious earth. For English writers and thinkers, the urge to rescue the core values of a waning Christianity for secular culture drove literary explorations and educational ventures for over a hundred years. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Her books include Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison’s (Hi)stories and Truths (1999) and The Story of Jazz: Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination (2001), and The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (Ed. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987) she was. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. Justine Tally is Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna, where she specializes in African American literature. TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. 2 Toni Morrison-author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby-is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.It is the story-set in post-Civil War Ohio-of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death who has lost a husband and buried a child who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. ![]() ![]() ![]() As Rosaline, she makes it look effortless to honor and satirize both Shakespeare and rom-com genre tropes.īased on the concept of Rebecca Serle’s YA book “When You Were Mine,” which remixed Romeo & Juliet with contemporary teens in California, Rosaline actually turns back the clock to go full period piece in the 16th century. Rosaline definitely checks those boxes with the incredibly versatile Kaitlyn Dever proving there’s no genre she can’t conquer with her prodigious talents. Often cringy in the wrong hands, success very much hinges on how well the lead pulls it off and if the overall tone of the piece has a point of view that firmly embraces the tongue-in-cheek. Intentionally anachronistic approaches to period pieces are having a bit of a moment in 2022, what with Persuasion, Catherine, Called Birdy, and The Princess. ![]() ![]() ![]() After all, like in most of the examples I mentioned above, being infected with a fungal plague usually meant very bad things-like turning into a mindless, slavering zombie, for one. Which was why, when I first found out about the premise of The Genius Plague by David Walton, I was immediately intrigued. From The Last of Us to The Girl with All the Gifts, a great number of books, movies, and video games have come out in recent years to show us just how screwed humanity would be if we ever went to war with Kingdom Fungi. After so many years, that infamous scene of the killer parasitic fungus bursting forth from the back of a dead ant’s head like some kind of grotesque alien worm still gives me the heebie-jeebies-and clearly, I’m not the only one who feels this way. ![]() Case in point: the “Jungles” episode of Planet Earth. ![]() Forget horror movies if you ever want to see some truly messed up, freaky bone-chilling stuff, look no further than your BBC nature documentary. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own. I received a review copy from the publisher. Book Review: The Genius Plague by David Walton ![]() ![]() Nick is anticipating the beginning of classes in a PhD program in literature at University College London, where he will research the style of author Henry James. ![]() Rachel and Gerald Fedden are the parents of Toby, one of Nick’s classmates at Oxford, and a daughter, Catherine. The Line of Beauty begins in the summer of 1983, as narrator Nick Guest lodges in the home of the Feddens in Notting Hill near London shortly after graduating from Oxford. It also takes place during Britain’s political uncertainty and turmoil, combining these large narrative threads into a novelistic outcome that is both ironic and tragic. ![]() Set in the London underground gay scene of the early 1980s, an era that was known for its vibrant urban club culture, gay civil rights protests, and the simultaneous panic about the AIDS crisis. Alan Hollinghurst’s historical fiction The Line of Beauty (2004) was the first work classified in the genre of gay literature to receive the U.K.’s Booker Prize. ![]() |