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 […]
A summary of a classic novel F. Scott Fitzgerald left behind one of the most perfect novels ever written, The Great Gatsby: at least, that is the version of many critics. But even Fitzgerald once said, ‘I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.’ Yet Nostromo is a […]
A reading of a late work by Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad’s 1916 novella The Shadow-Line is much more conventional, at least ostensibly or superficially, than some of his most celebrated earlier fiction, such as Nostromo (1904) or Under Western Eyes (1911), even though it was written later than both of those novels. In many […]
The top ten best Joseph Conrad books, selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Joseph Conrad wrote numerous full-length novels, but what were Conrad’s best books? From his debut in 1895, Almayer’s Folly, to his final novel, Suspense (which he left unfinished – aptly, given the novel’s title – upon his death in 1924), Conrad’s […]
Five fun facts about Joseph Conrad, author of the classic novella Heart of Darkness 1. In his twenties, Conrad resolved to kill himself with a gun – but miraculously he survived. Joseph Conrad – born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-occupied Poland in 1857 – was a bit of a gambler in his […]