Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category
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The Iron Heel – Jack London’s Oligarchic Rule
18 Jan 2020The name Jack London will ring up associations in most American readers from “To Build a Fire,” his enduringly…
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The Milkman — Civilians in a War Zone
08 Jan 2020In the summer of 1972 I spent a month, with my then dearest friend, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in…
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
19 Dec 2019One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade…
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Gustav Flaubert on Love and Revolution
10 Oct 2019Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that,…
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The Use of Man — Aleksandar Tišma
20 Sep 2019Wars are waged and war novels are written. Seldom are they written about small, out-of-the-way places or non-heroic people, …
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The Communist – A Novel from Italy
21 Aug 2019The number of readers for a novel titled The Communist, in the United States, with its long history of…
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The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
01 May 2019Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where…
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The Gallery by John Horne Burns: Americans in Naples, 1944
24 Apr 2019Missing in almost all war fiction, from the time of Gilgamesh (2800 BCE) on, is the recognition that war…
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One Man’s Justice – Akira Yoshimura
08 Apr 2019The stories we tell about what we know and what we suppose, what we fear and what we love,…
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A Small Circus – Hans Fallada; Small town life in 1929 Germany
02 Apr 2019One of the most memorable and powerful novels I have read in recent years is Hans Fallada‘s Every Man…
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Soldiers Alive – A Novel of the Japanese in China, 1937
11 Jan 2019For century upon century, from the time of the stories of Gilgamesh (18th BCE), stories of war have been told…
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Red Cavalry — Isaac Babel; Russia at War
05 Dec 2018In between wars are other wars. Men fight in them all, whatever is available. Between World War I and…
