Why did Vladimir love this book?
A bravura performance by a brilliant author with total control of her writing skills and an exhaustive mastery of literary traditions, which she deploys with the panache of Horowitz playing Chopin.
Oates has written a neo-Gothic novel filled with demonic manifestations and overwhelming passions that take place against the background of American society (and Princeton University) with all its salient characteristics and problems in the first decade of the 20th century.
The novel is also, and not incidentally, filled with wonderful, three-dimensional portraits of major American cultural and political figures of the time—Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, Jack London, and others. Oates’ emotional range is marvelous, and she can communicate the feelings and psychic churnings of a stiff Calvinist on a pulpit as readily as those of a tremulous young woman in a rose garden.
A funny, eerie, assured, and extraordinarily entertaining work.
3 authors picked The Accursed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This eerie tale of psychological horror sees the real inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Princeton fall under the influence of a supernatural power. New Jersey, 1905: soon-to-be commander-in-chief Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton University. On a nearby farm, Socialist author Upton Sinclair, enjoying the success of his novel 'The Jungle', has taken up residence with his family. This is a quiet, bookish community - elite, intellectual and indisputably privileged. But when a savage lynching in a nearby town is hushed up, a horrifying chain of events is initiated - until it becomes apparent that the families of Princeton have been beset…