English Literature Club: books, essays,reviews.

2021-07-13 13:59:24 The Door in the Wall
And Other Stories
by H. G. Wells

The Door in the Wall, considered by both readers and critics, to be Wells’s finest tale, examines an issue to which Wells returned repeatedly in his writing: the contrast between aesthetics and science and the difficulty of choosing between them. This collection also includes The Star, A Dream of Armageddon, The Cone, A Moonlight Fable, The DiamondMaker, The Lord of the Dynamos, and The Country of the Blind. Open / Comment

2021-05-28 10:36:03 Virgin Soil
by Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament. It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini’s Duties of Man, and other congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they had been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to read Tolstoi, and Turgenev’s powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country’s predicament did not lose its effect. Open / Comment

2021-04-30 23:04:30 Black Star's Campaign
by Johnston McCulley
Probably McCulley’s second most popular character (after Zorro), The Black Star is a criminal mastermind, what was once termed a ‘gentleman criminal.’ He does not commit murder, nor does he permit any of his gang to kill – not even the police or his arch enemy, Roger Verbeck. The Black Star does not threaten women, always keeps his word, and is invariably courteous. Nor does he deal with narcotics in any of his stories. He is always seen in a black cloak and a black hood on which is embossed a jet black star. The Black Star and his gang use ‘vapor bombs’ and ‘vapor guns’ to render their victims instantly unconscious, a technique which pre-dated the Green Hornet’s gas gun by several decades. Open / Comment

2021-04-21 22:44:44 Last Men in London
by Olaf Stapledon
Last Men in London follows an Englishman named Paul, from childhood through service with an ambulance crew in the First World War (mirroring Stapledon’s own personal history) to adult life. Olaf Stapledon’s previous science-fiction novel, Last and First Men, envisioned two billion years of history, from the 1930s forward. In this companion piece, a super-intelligent narrator from the remote future investigates 20th-century life, entering Paul’s mind to observe his childhood, his service during World War I, and his life afterward. Open / Comment

2021-03-23 15:35:16 The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward
by H. P. Lovecraft
A nameless terror surges through centuries to engulf the soul of Charles Dexter Ward, a brilliant New England antiquarian. Ward is driven to unleash these loathsome horrors upon a defenceless world, possessed by the demonic shade of his ancestor Joseph Curwen, a warlock steeped in the blackest arts of magic. Open / Comment