CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION · FICTION
Patrick Braybrooke
Most acclaimed
The short story
Nathaniel Hawthorne / The artist of the beautiful Edgar Allan Poe / [Cask of Amontillado]( Herman Melville / [Bartleby the scrivener]( A tale of Wall Street Fyodor Dostoevsky / The crocodile Anton Chekhov / On official business Guy De Maupassant / Minuet Giovanni Verga / The she-wolf Henry James / The middle years Joseph Conrad / Il Conde J.F. Powers / Lions, harts, leaping does Stephen Crane / The blue hotel Maxim Gorky / Twenty-six men and a girl James Joyce / [Counterparts]( Italo Svevo / Generous wine Dennis Lynds / A blue blonde in the sky over Pennsylvania John Galsworthy / The Japanese quince Franz Kafka / In the penal colony F. Scott Fitzgerald / The diamond as big as the Ritz Luigi Pirandello / In the abyss Katherine Mansfield / The fly Sherwood Anderson / Death in the woods William Faulkner / [A rose for Emily]( Ernest Hemingway / The short happy life of Francis Macomber Frank Rooney / Cyclists' raid Flannery O'Connor / A good man is hard to find James Thurber / The unicorn in the garden Shirley Jackson / The witch Carson McCullers / Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland Philip Roth / The conversion of the Jews Jorge Luis Borges / Death and the compass Julio Cortazar / Bestiary Paul Bowles / The scorpion Ilse Aichinger / The bound man Ted Hughes / Snow Robert Creeley / The boat Douglas Woolf / The flyman Michael Rumaker / The pipe Alain ARobbe-Grillet / The secret room
Oscar Wilde
1913
In this long-awaited biography, Wilde the legendary Victorian--brilliant writer and conversationalist, reckless flouter of social and sexual conventions--is brought to life. More astute and forbearing, yet more fallible than legend has allowed, Wilde is given here the dimensions of a modern hero. The author depicts Wilde's comet-like ascent on the Victorian scene and his equally dramatic sudden eclipse. He presents Wilde's Irish background, the actresses to whom he paid court, his unfortunate wife and lovers, his clothes, coiffures, and the decor of his rooms. The saga of his 1882 American tour is recounted with a wealth of new details; also his later impact on the bastions of the French literary establishment. The London of the Nineties, of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lillie Langtry and the Prince of Wales, is evoked alongside Paris of the "belle époque" and the Greece, Italy and North Africa of Wilde's travels. This critical account of Wilde's entire oeuvre shows him as the proponent of a radical new aesthetic who was perilously at odds with Victorian society. After his period of success and daring, the fatal love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas is followed by exposure, imprisonment, a few wretched years abroad and death in exile. The tragic end of Wilde's life leaves the reader with a sense of compassion and grief for the protagonist.