Genre Other. Page - 373

Description

No More Parades is the second in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End series. The book, released just a few years after the close of the war, is based on Ford’s combat experiences as an enlisted man in World War I, and continues the story first begun in Some Do Not ….

Christopher Tietjens, after recovering from the shell shock he suffered in Some Do Not …, has returned to the edge of the war as a commanding officer in charge of preparing draft troops for deployment to the front. As the “last true Tory,” Tietjens demonstrates talent bordering on genius as he struggles against the laziness, incompetence, and confusion of the army around him—but his troubles only begin when his self-centered and scandalous wife Sylvia appears at his base in Rouen for a surprise visit.

Unlike Some Do Not …, which was told in a highly modernist series of flash-backs and flash-forwards, Parade’s End is a much more straightforward narrative. Despite this, the characters continue to be realized in an incredibly complex and nuanced way. Tietjens, almost a caricature of the stiff, honorable English gentleman, stoically absorbs the problems and suffering of those around him. Ford simultaneously paints him as an almost Christlike character and an immature, idealistic schoolboy, eager to keep up appearances despite the ruination it causes the people around him. Sylvia, his wife, has had her affairs and scandals, and is clearly a selfish and trying personality; but her powerful charm, and her frustration with both her almost comically stiff-lipped husband and the war’s interruption of civilization, lends her a not-unsympathetic air. The supporting cast of conscripts and officers is equally well-realized, with each one protraying a separate aspect of war’s effect on regular, scared people simply doing their best.

The novel was extremely well-reviewed in its time, and it and the series it’s a part of remain one of the most important novels written about World War I.

Description

The Great Gatsby is a novel that needs no introduction for a certain generation of American readers. Long taught as required reading in American schools, critics have consistently held it up alongside Moby Dick, Huck Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird as perhaps the quintessential Great American Novel.

Nick Carraway is a young Midwestern man freshly arrived in New York to make his fortune. He rents a shabby apartment in Long Island next door to a sumptuous mansion: the home of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Carraway spends time catching up with his distant cousin Daisy and her industry-baron husband Tom before being invited to one of Gatsby’s wildly lavish weekend parties. There he meets Jordan, a flapper and a golf star, and an intricate web of romances and betrayals begins to unfold.

The novel is a colorful study of America’s Jazz Age—a term said to be coined by Fitzgerald himself—complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he’s already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city?

Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-league school who went to live on Long Island. Despite his meager finances he hobnobbed with socialites, and spent his career struggling for money to maintain the grand style his romantic interests were accustomed to.

The cover art, titled Celestial Eyes, was commissioned from Francis Cugat, who completed it before the novel was finished. The huge eyes gazing down on the blazing city so moved Fitzgerald that he wrote them into the story.

Fitzgerald saw the novel as a purely artistic work, free of the pulp pandering required by his shorter commissions—but despite that, contemporary reviews were mixed, and it sold poorly. Fitzgerald thought it a failure, and died believing the novel to be fatally obscure. Only during World War II did it come back to the public consciousness, buoyed by the support of a ring of writers and critics and printed as an Armed Service Edition to be sent to soldiers on the front. Now it is an American classic.

Description

In the midst of the French Revolution, Pierre, a young firebrand, convinces a group of rabble to rise up against the local duc. Coming across the carriage of the duc’s daughter on their march, Pierre assaults her, is run over by the carriage, and disappears. Looking to punish someone for the uprising, the duc has Pierre’s father hanged.

Years later, Pierre has changed his name, gathered some wealth, and ingratiated himself with the duc (who does not know him). Pierre has plans to avenge his father’s death against both the duc and his daughter, and he has enlisted the aid of Chauvelin, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s avowed enemy. The Pimpernel will have all he can handle if he is to foil Pierre’s plans.

Although published a few years after El Dorado, this sixth book in the series is set prior to it in the timeline.

Description

Early in his literary career Oscar Wilde published two collections of children’s stories and fairy tales. This edition contains the stories from both The Happy Prince and Other Tales, published in 1888, and A House of Pomegranates, published in 1891. The two books present two slightly different sensibilities, and though stories like “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant” have grown into timeless children’s classics, the darker tales told in A House of Pomegranates remain less well known and were, as Wilde said, “intended neither for the British child nor the British public.”

While Wilde is best known as a playwright and celebrated for his wit and aphorisms, his early writings contain the seeds of his biting criticism of late Victorian society. And this was true no more so than in these fairy stories which explore the ideals of friendship, love, kindness and charity; the stories both celebrate these attributes and show how they are too often twisted or ignored by the very societies that espouse them.

Description

Yama (The Pit) recounts the lives of a group of prostitutes living and working in Anna Markovna’s brothel in the town of K⸺. The women, subject to effective slavery through the removal of their papers and onerous debts, act out a scene of easy affability every evening for the part ignorant, part monstrous clients, while keeping secret their own pasts and wished-for futures.

The book was Kuprin’s attempt to denormalize the cultural ambiguity of the legal brothels of the time. His dedication—“to mothers and youths”—expresses his desire that there should no longer be a silent acceptance of the actions of the “fathers, husbands, and brothers.” The novel was notable for portraying the inhabitants of the brothels as living, breathing people with their own hopes and desires, not purely as a plot point or scenario.

The critical response was mixed: many found the subject matter beyond the pale. Kuprin himself placed his hopes on a favourable review from Leo Tolstoy, which didn’t come; but there was praise for Yama as both social commentary and warning, and an appreciation for Kuprin’s attempt to detail the everyday lives of his subjects.

The novel had a troubled genesis, with the first part taking nine years between initial proposal and first publication; the second and third parts followed five years later. It was a victim of the Russian censors who, tellingly, disapproved more of scenes involving officials visiting the brothels, than the brothels themselves. It was only later during preparations for an anthology of his work that an uncensored version was allowed to be released. This edition is based on the translation to English by Bernard Guilbert Guerney of that uncensored version, and was first published in 1922.

Description

The posh, English daughter of an Australian pastoralist is sent to Kuryong station to learn the ropes. At the same time, a search is underway across the desolate innards of regional New South Wales for the lost son of a wealthy uncle. These stories collide to give a humorous take on the values of family, marriage and hard work, set in the beautiful backdrop of the Australian Outback.

This was Banjo Paterson’s first novel after a string of widely celebrated poems written in the late 1800s.

Description

McTeague is an enormously strong but dim-witted former miner now working as a dentist in San Francisco towards the end of the nineteenth century. He falls in love with Trina, one of his patients, and shortly after their engagement she wins a large sum in a lottery. All is well until McTeague is betrayed and they fall into a life of increasing poverty and degradation.

This novel is often presented as an example of American naturalism where the behavior and experience of characters are constrained by “nature”—both their own heredity nature, and the broader social environment.

McTeague was published in 1899 as the first of Norris’s major novels.

Description

Edith Nesbit was a popular children’s author of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras in Britain. Though she was writing more than a century ago, her books nevertheless remain popular and are generally still in print.

The House of Arden was published in 1908. Like her other, perhaps better known tales, such as Five Children and It, the story takes quite ordinary children of the time and plunges them into fantastical adventures.

In this book, two children, with the interesting Saxon names of Edred and Elfrida, aged 10 and 12 respectively, discover that due to the death of a distant relative, young Edred is now Lord of Arden. The estate consists of not much more than a little money, a crumbling castle, and an attached house. An old retainer tells them of a legend regarding the Lord of Arden and a buried treasure. Naturally they are eager to locate the treasure, which may help them restore the castle. They discover a way to summon up the mascot of the House, a white mole or “mouldiwarp,” who enables them to travel back through time in search of the treasure.

Description

In the Scarlet Pimpernel’s fourth outing, he and his league want to free the orphaned Dauphin of France from his captors. But someone else has the same idea, although for very different, and selfish, reasons. In addition to trying to outflank his rival, the Pimpernel also has to deal with a member of his inner circle whose romance has caused him to disobey orders and put the entire plan in jeopardy. Completing his mission while once again escaping the clutches of his arch-enemy Chauvelin will push the Pimpernel to the breaking point.

Description

A young woman in 17th century Holland inadvertently overhears the details of a plot to kill a political figure. The principal figures in the plot, one of whom is her brother and another her former lover, hire an insolent English mercenary to kidnap her to get her out of the way until their deeds are done. From there very little goes according to plan.

For her fifth novel in the series, Baroness Orczy uses Franz Hals’ famous painting titled The Laughing Cavalier to build an elaborate backstory for the ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel.