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Posted in Classics on Jan 13th, 2008
reviewed by John Murphy
François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and recipient of France’s Legion d’honneur, was among the last century’s most pre-eminent men of letters, and a devout Roman Catholic. Vipers’ Tangle is one of Mauriac’s most famous works, a book of bruising beauty that explores man’s capacity for love and hate, bitterness and [...]
Posted in Literary Criticism on Dec 4th, 2007
The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy [...]
Posted in Classics, Literary Criticism on Dec 2nd, 2007
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, has recently authored a book called Classics for Pleasure, about the abiding joy of reading “duh classics,” as Tony Curtis would say. Included in Dirda’s book is an essay on G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which G.K. fans should be pleased-as-punch about. In [...]
plots from Shakespeare and the myth of St. George and the Dragon inspire this provocative mystery-thriller by CatholicFiction.net editor Debra Murphy.
More about the book....
Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole….In our own day, the English novelist who has most conspicuously defied his contemporaries is Evelyn Waugh.
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