J. Vijay Maharaj, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus
Author V.S. Naipaul, who died on Aug. 11, both scorned and mirrored his Caribbean origins. At the University of the West Indies, students must reconcile this conflicted titan’s literary legacy.
Every character in The Life To Come is complex, frustratingly unfulfilled, marked by kindness, selfishness, or dumb selflessness. But they are always, entirely, convincing.
To Kill a Mockingbird is no sermon. Its lessons are presented in effortless style, tackling the complexity of race issues with startling clarity and a strong sense of reality.
This week is the 200th anniversary of Emily Bronte’s birth. If reading Wuthering Heights - her only published novel - feels like a suspension in a state of waking nightmare, what a richly-hued vision of the fantastical it is.
The meanings of Ondaatje’s Golden Man Booker win is complicated and demonstrates the contradictions of literary value. Literary prizes permit us to imagine that literature is more than a commodity.
Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji, served in the Japanese imperial court. She transformed her experiences into an intricate narrative fusing fiction, history, and poetry.
William Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying the day after the 1929 Wall Street crash. It documents, through the voices of 15 characters, the emergence of a poor white family into the modern world.
Completed by Cervantes when he was in prison, Don Quixote is the tale of a man so passionate about reading he leaves home to live the life of his fictional heroes.
The powerful ideological connection between Australia and agriculture is being increasingly scrutinised. A spate of recent books have recast basic assumptions about our relationship to the land.
Did you know Lucy Maud Montgomery also published under the name Belinda Bluegrass? A new database of early Canadian women writers reveals thousands of stories about women’s lives in Canada.
In this age of the pseudo-factual, its more important than ever to acquaint ourselves with the foundations of the scientific tradition, such as Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Spanish-speaking writers have made exceptional contributions to American literature. Here are the best Latin American and Latino authors you probably haven’t heard of.
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.
In our ongoing Guide to the Classics series, we look at Heart of Darkness: the product of dark historical energies that continue to shape our contemporary world.