Our minds are wired to anticipate what’s coming next – and fill in the gaps when we don’t have all the information.
Australian pulp fiction: these works can be read as a symptom, laying bare the unspoken fears, desires, dreams and nightmares of the time.
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Mid-20th century pulp fiction was trashy, tasteless, exploitative and lurid. There’s a lot there to love. You might read pulp as a cultural Freudian slip, loony bulletins from the collective Id.
An ad for cotton thread drawing on the scene in Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver is tied down by Liliputians.
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The long and turbulent history of the Nobel Prize for Literature continues.
Nancy Miriam Hawley, founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Inc., with different editions of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Photo
Like their predecessors, today’s feminists can get mired in disagreements over strategies and goals. The celebrated feminist text suggests a more constructive approach.
In Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ each character approaches marriage with a different set of expectations – and many succumb to disappointment.
Internet Archive Book Images
In their coverage of Meghan and Harry, the media are focusing on all of the wrong things. Thankfully, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had sharp insights about marriage that still resonate today.
Jia Baoyu, the protagonist of Dream of the Red Chamber, as drawn by Gai Qi, 1879.
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Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, follows the travails of a pubescent boy. Somehow, through the spats, crushes and rivalries of a handful of teenagers, the great questions of the human condition are broached.
The theme at the core of Rowling’s wizarding world speaks directly to a universal human reality: The struggle to come to terms with our mortality.
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We may think of Harry Potter as escapist delight, but J.K. Rowling’s books also contain an extended theme that has more in common with King Lear than most English professors might care to admit.
Le Guin’s father, Alfred Kroeber, was at a forefront of a movement that rejected social Darwinism and cultural superiority. In his daughter’s fiction, we see these ideas come to life.
Christina Ricci as Zelda and David Hoflin as F. Scott in the TV series Z: The Beginning of Everything (2015). Two films about Zelda’s life are currently underway, starring Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence respectively.
Amazon Studios, Killer Films, Picrow
During her lifetime, Zelda Fitzgerald’s creativity and contribution to her husband’s work were woefully undervalued. Two new films will tell her story.
Meredith Shaw, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The state-produced stories, which include tales about apartment lotteries, theme parks and the Clintons, might seem absurd. But they offer a window into the regime’s priorities and anxieties.
The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel.
Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath.
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is often acclaimed as the best novel ever written. The enthralling narrative explores love and family through intertwining plot lines, with Anna and her desire at the centre.