Book Reviews – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

The Lesser Conrad: Notes on Under Western Eyes

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits one of Joseph Conrad’s less celebrated masterpieces

The narrative style of Joseph Conrad’s 1911 novel Under Western Eyes is unusual. The narrator is not quite an omniscient third-person narrator (certainly, there is much he doesn’t know, as he keeps reminding us); nor is he a first-person narrator recounting things from his perspective (he wasn’t there any more than we were); nor is he merely the frame device for introducing the ‘found’ text of the protagonist Razumov’s account of the events, since he insists on mediating throughout, and won’t merely hand over the account of what happened fully to us. Nor does Razumov recount the events of the novel to us in the form of a verbal tale, as Marlow does with Conrad’s earlier novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). In short, Under Western Eyes has an odd narrative premise.

The Surprising Story of Literary Censorship

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis’ study of literary censorship

Censored: A Literary History of Subversion & Control is a book that’s been sitting in my office for a long time now – an embarrassingly long time – since I was kindly sent a review copy by the British Library. This is not because I’ve been worried the book would not be both enjoyable and interesting (and, it turns out, it is both).

Danse Macabre: Stephen King’s Dance of Death

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Stephen King’s early non-fiction book about horror

In 1999, the prolific author Stephen King had his own dance with death. One afternoon, he was walking on the shoulder of a road near his home in the US state of Maine, when a van collided with King, badly injuring him. As he lay recovering from his brush with mortality, King penned a book that has gone on to become one of the most popular non-fiction books about the craft of writing. The paradox of Stephen King has always been that he made writing fiction look like something anyone could do, which is not something any writer could have done. As the old sports commentator’s line has it, his talent lies in making it look effortless – easy, even.

Advanced World-Building: Jack Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Jack Vance’s inventive quartet of picaresque fantasy novels

I’ll admit that Tales of Dying Earth, the fat bumper edition of Jack Vance’s novels set on an Earth whose sun is about to go out forever, sat on my bookshelf for around fifteen years before I actually got round to reading it. It shouldn’t have taken a self-confessed fantasy fan like me that long: the creators of Dungeons and Dragons cited Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth as an influence on their development of the role-playing fantasy game, and I devoured Weis and Hickman’s early D&D tie-ins, the Dragonlance novels, as a teenager. Pleasingly, there’s even a reference to

The Descendants of Conan: John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads about one of Conan the Barbarian’s literary offspring

When I was a teenager devouring every fantasy book I could find, one of my favourite writers was Robert E. Howard. His Conan Chronicles – reprinted by Gollancz in a glorious two-volume edition as part of their Fantasy Masterworks series – sound rather crude and even unpromising when you try to explain to people what happens in a Conan story.