On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong

“Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you, even if the word I put down is one word further from where you are.” Universal Language Although the inevitable truth has been thrust upon him, he continues to write in a desperate attempt to hold a semblance of normality that illiteracy does not play a border of …

Nature and Humans

Still Searching One could find the concept of nature in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It is a long poem which is narrative in style. Dante wrote Divine Comedy during the thirteen years of his life while he was in exile. The poem is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. The poem focuses on the …

Burmese Days — George Orwell

The White Club In the upper Burma outpost of Kyauktada in the waning days of British colonialism, a handful of Europeans get together regularly in their exclusive European Club to drink alcohol and complain about the natives. One native, U Po Kyin, conspires to gain membership to the Club after finding out that the Europeans must elect one …

Second Place — Rachel Cusk

M invites a famous painter, L, to stay in the guest house that she and her second husband, Tony, have constructed on the remote marsh where they live. She hopes L will paint the marsh; she has been an admirer of his work since, years before, she happened upon an exhibition of his at a …

The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway

Jake Barnes was an American veteran of World War I. He suffered a major injury at the war that made him impotent. Post-war, he worked as a journalist and moved to Paris where he lived next to Robert Cohn, his college friend and a fellow journalist. Unlike Barnes, however, Cohn was not a war veteran …

The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead

He is surrounded by the injustice of segregation but inspired by the early Civil Rights Movement. Raised with the love of his strict and religious grandmother, he is described as diligent student. He is a serious diligent boy who is unable to turn a blind eye to injustice. That makes him different from the other …

The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine …

The Coexistence of the Past and the Present

The poet Charles Baudelaire characterised the modern world as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”, meaning times were changing and the feeling they were changing was faster than ever before. “Transitory, fugitive element” of modernity, as he described, was “the shock of time” in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Actually, it was even closer to terror: “For …

Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People On Earth — Wole Soyinka

Duyole Pitan-Payne, Prince Badetona, Dr. Kighare Menka, and Farodion are the Gong of Four. They are in their late fifties and early sixties. Their dreams to help build a hospital for Dr. Menka, in his rocky village had withered away with age, maturity and the fast-paced development of Abuja, Nigeria. The reader initially meet three …

Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders

George Saunders’s The Lincoln in the Bardo (published in 2017) takes place on February 20, 1862, in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington DC where 11-year-old William “Willie” Lincoln―Abraham Lincoln’s son—has just been buried following his death due to typhoid. The story takes place in the midst of American Civil War (1861-1865). The cemetery has …