Ellen N. La Motte’s ‘The Backwash of War’ was praised for its clear-eyed portrayal of war, but was swiftly banned. Yet the similarities between her spare prose and Hemingway’s are unmistakable.
Li Kui (李逵), one of the characters in The Water Margin, battles tigers after they killed his mother. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, between between 1845 and 1850.
Wikimedia
In The Water Margin, first put to paper in the 14th century, local injustice is the rule, and defence against cruel local authority is a matter of vengeance, stratagem, and violence
German citizens in Magdeburg the morning after Kristallnacht.
German Federal Archive
Have you ever read a novel in the second person? You probably found it strange.
Australian crime fiction author Peter Corris published 102 novels in lifetimes, including 52 centred on the private investigator Cliff Hardy.
ALLEN AND UNWIN
A lack of respect for history, a population conditioned to consume goods at breakneck pace, and pacification of individuals via an entertainment culture: parts of Huxley’s novel strikingly resemble our own world.
Author Michelle de Kretser with her Miles Franklin prize-winning novel, The Life To Come.
Courtesy Perpetual/Copyright Agency/Martin Ollman.
Every character in The Life To Come is complex, frustratingly unfulfilled, marked by kindness, selfishness, or dumb selflessness. But they are always, entirely, convincing.
Philip Roth would call the Jewish resistance to his work “the luckiest break I could have had.”
AP Photo/Douglas Healey
With the Holocaust still on their mind, many American Jews were highly sensitive to portrayals of Jews in popular culture. So when Roth’s sex-obsessed characters came along, the pushback was swift.
Tim Winton sets his latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, in the salt lakes of Western Australia.
Shutterstock.com
In their novels, Nathanael West and Bret Easton Ellis depict a world few want to admit exists, a place where ‘Unless you’re willing to do some pretty awful things, it’s hard getting a job.’
A novelist who compared a man’s genitals to a billiard rack has won this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. But not all entries were that silly.
Ernest Hemingway with a bull near Pamplona, Spain in 1927, two years before ‘A Farewell to Arms’ would be published.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
A newly published batch of Ernest Hemingway’s letters could change the way we think about the author’s influences, relationships with other writers and views on race.
Kazuo Ishiguro in his garden in London.
Neil Hall/EPA
English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier…
Josephine Wilson has won the 2017 Miles Franklin award for her novel Extinctions. Judging panel chair Richard Neville stated Wilson’s novel, “explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness…
Former Globe and Mail newspaper reporter turned novelist Omar El Akkad contemplates his debut book American War in his publisher’s Toronto office in this 2017 file photo.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)