Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson
For a National Book Award winner and a finalist for the 2008’s Pulitzer Prize, I expected much much more from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.
Tag: historical novel
Lonesome Traveler (1960) by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac was a famous writer known for his fictional, but mostly autobiographical, novel On the Road, depicting the Beat Generation and Sal Paradise bumming across the United States.
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Desert Solitaire (1968) by Edward Paul Abbey
Edward Abbey, “the patron saint of the radical environmental movement,” is one nature writer that includes many classifications found in nature writing into one seamless book.
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Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
Captain Beatty, in Fahrenheit 451, imagines how fire is much like censorship, both eradicated knowledge: “‘It’s perpetual motion…. What is fire? It’s a mystery… Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.’”
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**Author Spotlight** Sherwood Berton Anderson [ 115th Post ] by CG FEWSTON
Like all writers from the moment they put pen to paper, Anderson desired to be a great writer; however, much of his life was spent as a middle-class businessman in Ohio and Virginia, later becoming the owner of Marion Publishing Company and the owner and editor of two newspapers.
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Our Kind of Traitor (2010) by John le Carré (David Cornwell)
In one of his latest novels, Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré provides a tale of espionage that makes one cheer and hope for the villain to win, or at least survive. Perry and his girlfriend, Gail, befriend Dima, a Russian money-launderer, in Antigua while on vacation.
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Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson & the Hope of Saving the Planet
In “Rivers of Death” Carson continues the onslaught of scientific facts which illustrate how pesticides and insecticides not only destroy the land but how they also contaminate water supplies, indirectly poisoning human beings.
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**Author Spotlight** Margaret Atwood by Prof. CG FEWSTON
Atwood studied Moodie, wrote about Moodie, and both Atwood and Moodie lived and wrote about the Canadian wild and the female who is transformed by it. However, Moodie is not the only Canadian writer to have influenced Margaret Atwood and the short story “Death by Landscape.”
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1, 2005) by Stieg Larsson
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the trilogy and recent film with plans for the others to follow, illustrate how a writer can, on faith alone, understand what is necessary to write a compelling story.
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The Mosquito Coast (1982) by Paul Theroux
As a writer there is always the temptation to be a cruel god over the imagined characters, typing down conflict after conflict without sympathy; there is also an even greater risk of loving the characters too much, coddling them as babes, and becoming benevolent creators over the fiction.
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The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
There can be no successful revelation of a reader’s mind merging with that of the author without a strong narrative voice. Without a proper voice, characters fall to one dimensional shades and plot unravels like yarn balls on the floor of the reader’s imagination.
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The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles
Don’t Look Now, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Reverse psychology is a practical ploy for anyone to get an unsuspecting victim to do as he/she desires. But could this tactic work effectively in a novel?
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The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is a master example of an author choosing to simplify his sentences while maintaining an impressionistic style filled with clear images. The blend of the two craft elements, simplification used to express vividness, are what makes The Red Badge of Courage an American classic.
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The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon
Oedipa stumbles upon a conspiracy in California which eventually leads her onto an amazing adventure, landing her by the end of the book in an auction room as she awaits the crying, or an auctioneer shouting out a sale, of a stamp collection once owned by her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, who is deceased.
