This madcap Victorian adventure is hysterical from beginning to end. Third rate poet Lionel Savage has been unhappy since getting married. Though he fell hard for his beautiful and vivacious wife, marital life just doesn’t seem to be working for them. She has become aloof and he can no longer find inspiration. This book is both snort-out-loud funny and tickle-your-brain funny. Plus, it’s an entertaining adventure.
With such a broad category it is difficult to know where to begin… Lately I have been really connecting with books that put a twist on the the typical storytelling model. These books alter the framework and force us to experience story in a different way. Gillespie & I — by Jane Harris A fascinating and…
Despite my penchant for British literature, I must admit that this was my first foray into Amis. A complicated person in his own life, he seems to have attempted to shed some of his anxieties on his characters. Indeed, the title character James Dixon is dissatisfied professor of medievalism. He was surely drawing on some…
The Paris Review recently posted a contest. The idea was to be inspired by a funny illustration and write 300 words or less in the style of Ernest Hemingway, P. G. Wodehouse, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Bishop, or Ray Bradbury. Obviously I chose Wodehouse. I didn’t win — I didn’t even make the cut as a…
Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead “Thorough” is the first word I would use to describe this biography. Intense, assured, incisive. America had Hemingway and Fitzgerald, while England had Waugh and Wodehouse. Wodehouse found the whole scene rather silly and made hysterical fun of it. Waugh, on the other hand, had a more…