A collection of 27 posts
Nineteen-Eighty Four, whose first publication took place 70 years ago today, is itself a sort of anti-novel, one that undermines its own dramatic tension in a way that might now be described as postmodern.
An even moderately careful reading of Lolita should make it quite clear that it’s anything but a “celebration” of child rape.
If sensitivity readers become a publishing institution, they will only incentivize more cautious, conservative, and ideologically homogenous books.
Houellebecq depicts a Europe where French culture is a bad joke.
Orwell warned that liberty of thought—and literature with it—is endangered when writers in free countries adopt a “totalitarian outlook.”
Drama in the sci-fi/fantasy fandom may not be of great consequence for larger society (though the politicization of culture is a real and spreading problem).
Abdou responded to the advice she got by writing a different kind of book altogether. “These were big edits,” she says. “I now had a ghost story without a ghost.”
What, I wondered, would have happened had Jesus emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution?
Houellebecq has grave doubts about the net effect of the sexual revolution on human well-being.
They witnessed the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the siege of Vienna, ending a thousand years of implacable Islamic expansion.