‘…and the comfortable people… felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.’
Powerful and epic in its account of hardship and brutality, loneliness, segregation, exploitation and man’s inhumanity to man, The Grapes of Wrath somehow maintains a sense of hope in the determination and perseverance of the Joads and countless others, hungry and desperately poor, in their struggle to build a new life . I’m not sure why it’s only now that I’ve come to read this monumental work but one element that stands out, apart from the power of the prose and Steinbeck’s understanding and deep empathy with his characters, is its stark relevance to the inequality, dispossession, forced displacement and worldwide mass migration of our current times.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
Extraordinary SF noir. The novel that inspired Tartovsky’s classic 1979 film Stalker and the recent S.T.A.L.K.E.R videogame series from GSC Game World.
In a twist on the more usual First Contact trope, aliens have visited Earth then departed after a short stopover, deeming us irrelevant, too insignificant to bother with. In their wake they have left a mysterious wasteland known as the Zone. Perilous, largely toxic, off-limits to humans - among other anomalies, natural laws have been weirdly distorted and human DNA may be altered, with disturbing consequences. Here, it seems, the Visitors have dumped their trash – alien artefacts beyond human understanding but which we might possibly learn to make use of.
Redrick Schuhart is a misfit and a stalker, a scavenger proficient in illegally entering the Zone to retrieve and sell on the black market some of the strange tech the Visitors have discarded. Haunted by his past, often drunk and prone to violence, struggling to provide for his wife and mutant daughter, he also, for a price, escorts others who have their own reasons for exploring the alien wasteland.
The story is compellingly written, with a keen philosophical enquiry into the nature of humanity, exploring who the real aliens may be, and advancing a perhaps not-so-subtle but nonetheless critical caveat about the dangers of meddling with technologies we neither comprehend nor know how to control. Prescient, darkly atmospheric fiction.
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he…
1930s small-town Depression-era Georgia, USA. John Singer, a deaf mute, finds himself alone after his only friend is committed to a mental asylum. Little by little, four others in the community, almost equally solitary, find themselves drawn to him. They pour out their hearts, reveal to him their innermost thoughts, yearnings, disappointments, and he listens in silence and can reply only with short written notes. To them he has the aura of an almost godlike presence, yet, tragically, none of them see him for who he really is. Nor, each in their own estranged worlds, ever realise how much they all have in common.
It’s hard to believe this book, her debut novel, was first published when Mc Cullers was just 23 years old. It’s powerful Southern Gothic, the writing is exquisite and so mature, the lives of its characters poignantly and minutely observed with a profound understanding of human frailty: despair and disillusionment, sorrow, isolation, hopes, dreams, alienation set against a backdrop of poverty, racism, oppression, political and social division and ultimately loneliness, even or particularly in a crowd. It is heart-breaking at times, emotional and very moving, adapted into an award-winning 1968 film starring Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke – a novel that has influenced many other writers.
The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.
"A remarkable book...From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader."
In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed cafe owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds…
Enchantment's Reach is a land torn apart by internal and external conflict. Secrets from the past resurface, religious factions and fanatical cults revive ancient feuds. An unfathomable non-human warrior race musters at the border. A mysterious, powerful being materializes from somewhere deep within the Reach and an enigmatic child seems to hold the key to an extraordinary mystery.
Via intrigues and desperate quests, Issul and Leth, rulers of Enchantment's Reach, discover their world is not as they had perceived it. Journeying deep within mysterious Enchantment, where no human has ever been, they begin to uncover the true nature of the awakening universe into which they have been born.
Mystery and magic, conflict, intrigue, love, and suspense, all woven into a spellbinding fantasy saga.
