Showing results for "Literary History" in Alternate History

The Trial tells the story of a man arrested for an unknown crime by a remote, inaccessible authority and his struggle for control over the increasing absurdity of his life. One of Franz Kafka's best-known works, The Trial has been variously interpreted as an examination of political power, a satirical depiction of bureaucracy, and a pessimistic religious parable. Left unfinished at the time of Kafka's 1924 death, The Trial is nevertheless a trenchant depiction of the seemingly incomprehensible nature of existence....

While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the "Crackpot" file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel's will, written by several notable Nobel laureates - including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie - each offering an explanation of why and how Stonehenge was constructed. Diligent research uncovers that Alfred Nobel added a secret codicil to his will, a prize for the Nobel laureate who solves the mystery of Stonehenge.

If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.

This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The Trial is one of the great works of the 20th century - an extraordinary vision of one man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge. Kafka evokes all the terrifying reality of his ordeal.

In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises...

On the last day of December 1921, three enigmatic men - Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed African who controls the Middle East's supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust; O'Sullivan Beare, a former Irish patriot and gunrunner who has made a fortune selling spurious, phallic-shaped Christian artifacts; and Mark Szondi, a dedicated Zionist who wagers only fried fish futures - sit down to a fateful game of poker in the back room of a Jerusalem antiquities shop owned by a 3000-year-old knight errant.

The Trial by Franz Kafka, narrated by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, begins like a nightmare - only K is awake, and he is being arrested and indicted on charges he never learns. He is caught up in a legal system that will destroy his life. This is a text that often is used in English classes because it is so deep. Kafka attacks the norms of society, religion, and the legal system.

Jefferies' novel can be seen as an early example of "post-apocalyptic fiction." After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. The first part of the book, "The Relapse into Barbarism", is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilization and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England. The second part, "Wild England", is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

One of the great works of the 20th century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure.

When the family patriarch, Elliot, dies, it's revealed that he had been keeping five separate families, and in the aftermath of their discovery, his widows and children must come together to keep from losing all they have. But their livelihood is threatened when Elliot's estranged son tries to blackmail them, unleashing a series of violent confrontations between different factions of the family. A sparse family drama reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, combined with the intimate first-person narratives of Kazuo Ishiguro, Lord of California is a powerful debut novel.

Matt Reddy's old Asiatic Fleet destroyer USS Walker has been mysteriously transported to an alternate version of earth. Here, WWII is no longer raging, and Reddy and his crew have been trying to find a new place for themselves in this strange new world.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the 20th century, Mailer's novel delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.

When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina - a Jewish state established in the early 20th century - is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch. While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to act as though he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state's security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.

In a reimagined contemporary Edinburgh, where a tectonic fault has opened up to produce a new volcano in the Firth of Forth, and where tremors are an everyday occurrence, volcanologist Surtsey makes a shocking discovery. On a clandestine trip to new volcanic island The Inch, to meet Tom, her lover and her boss, she finds his lifeless body and makes the fatal decision to keep their affair, and her discovery, a secret. Desperate to know how he died, but also terrified she’ll be exposed, Surtsey’s life quickly spirals into a nightmare when someone makes contact - someone who claims to know what she’s done....

As we listen to each character tell their version of the events, layer upon layer of drama and suspense builds to the final and astonishing denouement of the first, and most magnificent, English detective novel.

The story of The Scarlet Plague takes place in 2073 in the San Francisco area, 60 years after an apocalyptic pandemic called the Red Death or Scarlet Plague has depopulated the Earth. James Smith, one of the survivors, lives with his grandsons who are hunter-gatherers in a tribal world. He relates the horror of the plague to them, and tells them of the time when he was a professor of English, and of the start of the pandemic. His grandsons, who are of limited cognitive ability, refuse to believe him; they cannot believe that the disease was spread by germs.

The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London, was the first example of a post-apocalyptic fiction novel in modern literature. Set in a ravaged and wild America, the story takes place in 2073, 60 years after the spread of the Red Death, an uncontrollable epidemic that depopulated and nearly destroyed the world in 2013. One of the few survivors, James Howard Smith, alias “Granser”, tells his incredulous and near-savage grandsons how the pandemic spread in the world and about the reactions of the people to contagion and death.