The title poem is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" and the Sanskrit mantra "Shantih shantih shantih."
Babbitt is largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior. It critiques the vacuity of middle-class American life and its pressure toward conformity. An immediate and controversial bestseller, Babbitt was influential in the decision to award Lewis the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930 "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." His acceptance speech is included in the Winter Weekend discussion.
This story is a Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier. Cather creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, it is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
This anthology of best-loved short stories and “novelettes” including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is set in the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's own term for the Roaring Twenties of newly confident, post-war America. This collection shows a comic genius at work, fashioning every genre from low farce to shrewd social insight, along with fantasy of extraordinary invention. These stories illuminate the unique talent who went on to write The Great Gatsby, and to become one of the enduring icons of American literature.
Mansfield’s work is innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour. These fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic to the vividly impressionistic evocation of family life. “All that I write,” Mansfield said, “all that I am - is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.”
In 1922, two years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton wrote a novel that was acclaimed by The New York Times and quickly became an international bestseller. Out of print for decades, The Glimpses of the Moon details the romantic misadventures of a 1920's couple with the right connections but no money.
We will be reading Henry IV from this collection of the plays that established Pirandello's reputation as an innovative dramatist. Pirandello ranks with Strindberg, Brecht, and Beckett as a seminal figure in modern drama. Innovative and influential, he broke decisively with the conventions of realist theatre to foreground the tensions between art and reality. In the brilliant Henry IV, a young man believes himself to be the Holy Roman Emperor; attempts to cure him of his delusion have disastrous consequences.