"Animal Farm" is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. Orwell is one of the very few modern satirists comparable to Jonathan Swift in power, artistry, and moral authority; in animal farm his spare prose and the logic of his...
The film adaptation for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes comes out in just a few months and we're getting ready by revisiting the books and the films in the series. We've also put together a reading list of classic literature that matches up with some of the key characters. Check it out!
We've all suffered the dreaded reading slump. Sometimes we just need a little kickstart to get us going again. For many of us, this can take the form of a few slim, unputdownable reads that we can finish in a day or so. Here are twenty titles (fiction and nonfiction) that might do the trick!
Since its launch in 1982, Banned Books Week has helped raise awareness of the many literary works that have been banned and/or challenged by individuals and groups across the U.S. through the years. To start the week off, let's take a look at some of the most frequently-challeneged or removed books from the last 20 years.
Okay, maybe we can’t eliminate censorship (yet...#goals), but we can celebrate Banned Books Week with gusto by reading all of the stories that someone (or someones) tried to silence, destroy, or restrict access to. Here are 50 of the most frequently banned and/or most recently challenged books, along with the "who, why, and how" of literary censorship in America.
A hundred years ago, novelist H.G. Wells predicted that science would be "king of the world." Titanic's Jack Dawson may take issue with that claim, but he’d have a tough time disputing the compelling influence Wells had on politics, society, and the future that extended far beyond the literary realm. Considering Wells is one the founding fathers of sci-fi (along with Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and the author of The Time Machine, The Invisible man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, that's saying something.