FreeBookNotes has 24 more books by John Brunner, with a total of 54 study guides.

To keep populations down, most states in the US have instituted some type of eugenics law, where for example, if you have the genes for hemophilia or color blindness, you are not allowed to have children. Many of the subplots involve attitudes about having children, race relations, post-colonialism, and populations turning into sheep. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question.

I tend to like books that experiment in style, but based on your description, it sounds rather slow. Nope — just the “Murderer’s Row” of advance blurbers featured on the back of Nathan Englander’s new effort, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

These satires seem fresh for several reasons. What a mess.

In an era in which “the writing life” is more important than the writing — Whelpdale’s job as “literary advisor,” grown to monstrous proportions — there’s something bracing about the book’s presentation of just how sordid, unprofitable, and unrewarding literature can be.

This is the story of a troubleshooter who specialises in fixing the vagaries of traffic flows. I must think it over.’.

The advent of periodicals in the early 18th century facilitated printing and distribution of book reviews, and authors and publishers wasted no time appropriating this new form of publicity.

That is the stamp of the ignobly decent life. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. But it isn’t simply Jasper’s gleeful cynicism that makes New Grub Street so perfect for today’s reader. But answering these questions responsibly demands more than the reflexive rage of an offended aesthete (Nobody cares!

Blovers are not yet widespread, but given the ubiquity of blaps it is only a matter of time. This was my first John Brunner book.

Imagine how long a city would last with all its traffic connections cut? Precisely. General Technics is getting involved in industrialization of a fictional African nation of Beninia, and Norman, being African American, is judged by his employer as the best guy to be the company ambassador, so off to Beninia he goes.

To tell the story, John Brunner relies on such techniques as the collage and jump-cut, usually associated with film narrative and with modernist writers, especially John Dos Passos. "The Squares of the City" does have the typical Brunner hallmarks, the unconventional narrative structure to point out one example. Another group of chapters is “context.” These chapters gather quotations, letters, reports, and speeches, mostly social commentary and mostly from the pen of Chad Mulligan, whose voice in them seems close to that of the (implied) author. “. GoodReads community and editorial reviews can be helpful for getting a wide range of opinions on various aspects of the book. For the most part, it works well in this way, though there are moments when the conceit of the story (basing the character moves upon a real historical chess match) threatens to intrude. It’s safe to assume that even in the pre-codex days of papyrus scrolls, a good way to assess the potential merits of Martial’s book would have been to read the first page or two, an ideal place for authors to insert some prefatory puff. 1. Better to be a prophet than a drudge. A good story from one of the masters. The second edition of Leaves of Grass is, as far as I know, the first example of a blurb printed on the outside of a book, in this case in gilt letters at the base of the spine: “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career / R W Emerson.” (Emerson’s letter appeared in its entirety at the end of the book along with several other reviews — three of which were written by Whitman — in a section entitled “Leaves-Droppings.”). the rest I *gasp! What separate’s Biffen’s theory from someone like David Shields and his inexhaustible desire for the “authentic” presentation of reality, as opposed to the too-neat, “artificial” pleasures of fiction — or from the work of Karl Ove Knausgard, which so many reviewers have acclaimed for being boring in the most interesting way? Whether it’s being used to provide a shocking glimpse into the far future of humanity (as in H.G.

After Whitman there were further innovations. All this makes New Grub Street a particularly potent corrective to the current cottage industry centering on “the writing life” — in which literary production is seen as glamorous, in which photos of writers’ desks appear on Pinterest and readers obsess over the perfect pen with which to write their buried masterpiece. Political maneuverings, strange alliances, color segregation, characters dying under complex circumstances, intricate traffic analysis, blocky format... sounds like a game of chess. Some people enjoy glancing at reviews, or choosing a book based on the endorsements of their favorite authors. I had no television, no phonograph, no job and very few friends. The two novelists at the center of New Grub Street are hopeless idealists, and their ideas themselves are so absurd that at first you don’t recognize their relationship to certain contemporary aesthetic trends. Accusing Morrison’s work of containing child pornography both ignores the very important distinction between pornography and rape and displays the weakness of the arguments against the book. To call The Bluest Eye pornographic is simply wrong. Are you a publisher, the sort of person who purports to sell books? If there’s any heroism in the writers he represents, it’s the bare fact of their persistence in the face of certain defeat. If there is a Stand on Zanzibar SparkNotes, Shmoop guide, or Cliff Notes, you can find a link to each study guide below. These circumstances include overcrowding, deprivation, and aggression.

In the 1600s practically everyone wrote commendatory verses, some of which were quite beautiful, like Ben Jonson’s for Shakespeare’s First Folio: “Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage / Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, / Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, / And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.” (Interestingly, Shakespeare himself never wrote any — one can only imagine what a good blurb from the Bard would have done for sales.). Orphaned and poor, Jasper is plain about his ambitions: he plans on amassing enough cultural power to be offered the editorship of a literary journal, at which point he will have the economic security necessary to allow him to write and publish whatever he likes. Dogs, Revolutionary Road, and The Thunderous Sea of Silence, I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Against the Anti-Art Literati: On Roberto Calasso’s ‘The Art of the Publisher’, Beauty is Truth: The Case Against Banning The Bluest Eye, Getting Meta about Mules: Faulkner and the Fine Art of Slowing Down, The Beauty That Lies in Wasted Time: On Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. That. If it were anything but tedious it would be untrue. In a crucial early scene, the young scholar Marian Yule sits in the Reading Room of the British Museum, struggling through some research, and has a vision of her own irrelevancy: [Marian] kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. 1. This was a world that Gissing, a financially strapped, critically respected, and solidly middle-tier (what we would nowadays call “midlist”) author, knew well, and he renders it in harsh, bitterly funny terms. Your email address will not be published. I eagerly await the writer who produces a similar look at our own.

Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Most of the characters in New Grub Street are not novelists.