literature
Geek literature from the New York Times or the recesses of online. Our favorite stories showcase geeks.
Review of 'On Wings and Ash'
Synopsis Alessa awoke the morning of the festival for Hades expecting nothing more than a night at the bonfires with her charming best friend. She never expected the rest... Not meeting the man she would end up promised to in marriage. Not the Spartan warrior or the desperate fight to save a lost princess. And certainly not the monsters who swooped down in the dark. When Alessa’s ability to communicate with them results in her taking the blame for the bloodshed, she’ll have to fight for her life. But she never imagined her future would depend on the trust of a stranger – the stranger she’s set to marry – or the strength of a long unspoken love. Before the night is over, more than just the bonfires might burn...
By Cyn's Workshop6 years ago in Geeks
The Best Works: William Faulkner
William Faulkner is one of my favourite writers in the world. From a young age, I was interested in Faulkner’s divine writing style, his southern gothic atmosphere, his Shakespearean and Biblical-scaled tragedies. Most importantly, I think I was interested in his characters the most. Faulkner’s works are known for being filled with intense darkness, destruction and the danger of humans when they are taken out of their natural environments. A satire on the heavy industrialisation of the USA during and after the times of the Civil War, Faulkner’s writing was often heaped in darkness, tragedy, well-written and almost poetically style prose along with characters that you could’ve seen coming from either a Shakespeare Play, the Bible or a 18th Century Opera. These almost Byronic heroes tend to take the Hamlet-like form and often end up worse than they began. Death overtakes in many cases and the natural world around the character is harmful, turned against them, as they move through the world and get out of their habitats, they long for release from this new, self-destructive lifestyle that brings them nothing but greed and misery.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
Review of 'Mayhem'
Synopsis The Lost Boys meets Wilder Girls in this supernatural feminist YA novel. It's 1987 and unfortunately it's not all Madonna and cherry lip balm. Mayhem Brayburn has always known there was something off about her and her mother, Roxy. Maybe it has to do with Roxy's constant physical pain, or maybe with Mayhem's own irresistible pull to water. Either way, she knows they aren't like everyone else. But when May's stepfather finally goes too far, Roxy and Mayhem flee to Santa Maria, California, the coastal beach town that holds the answers to all of Mayhem's questions about who her mother is, her estranged family, and the mysteries of her own self. There she meets the kids who live with her aunt, and it opens the door to the magic that runs through the female lineage in her family, the very magic Mayhem is next in line to inherit and which will change her life for good. But when she gets wrapped up in the search for the man who has been kidnapping girls from the beach, her life takes another dangerous turn and she is forced to face the price of vigilante justice and to ask herself whether revenge is worth the cost. From the acclaimed author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back, Estelle Laure offers a riveting and complex story with magical elements about a family of women contending with what appears to be an irreversible destiny, taking control and saying when enough is enough.
By Cyn's Workshop6 years ago in Geeks
Review of ‘The Burning’
Synopsis A rumor is like fire. And a fire that spreads online... is impossible to extinguish. New school. Check. New town. Check. New last name. Check. Social media profiles? Deleted. What happens when you can't run or hide from a mistake that goes viral? Anna and her mother have moved hundreds of miles to put the past behind them. Anna hopes to make a fresh start and escape the harassment she's been subjected to. But then rumors and whispers start, and Anna tries to ignore what is happening by immersing herself in learning about Maggie, a local woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. A woman who was shamed. Silenced. And whose story has unsettling parallels to Anna's own. From Laura Bates, internationally renowned feminist and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, comes a realistic fiction story for the #metoo era. It's a powerful call to action, reminding all readers of the implications of sexism and the role we can each play in ending it.
By Cyn's Workshop6 years ago in Geeks
The Best Works: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Biography Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorn was one of the key 19th Century American Writers of the Dark Romantic Era. But, he wasn't always the great writer that we appreciate him as today, he started off somewhere else.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"The Aeneid" by Virgil
It’s been about nine or ten years since I first read Virgil’s “Aeneid” and there’s a strange reason behind why I even read it in the first place. I found it in a beautiful copy at a bookstore. It was clothbound and patterned. The reason I actually picked it up was because I was watching a strange cartoon on the internet the previous day that was all to do with romans, I can’t remember exactly what it was but when I opened “The Aeneid”, the cartoons reminded me of the ones from the video - just drawn a billion times better. My first reading experience of “The Aeneid” was actually really strange because I remember trying to bullet point exactly what was happening all the way through the book and yet, I didn’t really understand what happened at the end because it didn’t really end at all. This book really ended up changing my opinion on the possibilities for poetry. It was a whole new poem with a great amount of drama. It was an epic in every sense of the word and I loved it so much that I ended up reading it every year since. I studied it for my undergraduate dissertation and I even got some people in to it online as well. It’s a brilliant poem with some great characters and history.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
July 4th: A Celebration of American Literature
American Independence Day is a great day, even though I am not American and nor do I live in America, I like to see how our friends across the Atlantic are celebrating this auspicious occasion. Filled with fireworks, party foods, gatherings of friends and family, this is set to be incredible day complete with unforgettable memories and happiness all around. American Independence Day is obviously the day where America celebrate being free of their overlords in Britain and became their own country, their own power and their own land. I think it’s a brilliant day to celebrate the works of fiction and nonfiction that came out of America due to its rapidly changing scene. From the late 1700s to the present, the USA has undergone so many changes in their artistic movements and so many social reforms that it is difficult to really count where one ends and another begins. I would like to celebrate alongside our friends across the Atlantic by offering a book set in every state of the USA. From the Southern Gothic to the Jazz Age, from the Harlem Renaissance to the 80s Transgressive Era and from Civil War Literature to the Post-Modern Destruction of the American Dream. American Literature has so much to offer us in terms of characters like the loveable George and Lennie from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” or the regrets of characters like Thomas Sutpen from Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!”, the terrifying prospect felt by John Unger in Fitzgerald’s “Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and even the innocence of one of the most beloved character from any American Literature Work ever, little Scout Finch of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry and back again, American Literature is endless in its surprises and innovation…
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
"Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty" by John W. De Forest
This book represents the way in which learning from each other can be a struggle especially in the midst of a war. But, the American Civil War is more than just war politics and a class struggle, it is also about race and slavery and humanity. There is also a great amount of violent language and the exploration I did into this book was to do with the way in which the characters talk about the war and what the reader learns about the view of the war throughout the novel. We get firsthand character judgements and a range of differing opinions to the way in which the war impacts the younger generation - both positively and negatively. When the reader encounters more humane characters, they are in no way perfect or even progressive for our own day, but when it comes to the American Civil War and the other characters who are brilliant examples of the racially insensitive and the racially abusive stereotypes, it makes the progressive characters obviously look more progressive than they actually are. Thus, we have this range of different characters that mostly depend on the way in which other characters too are viewed in the book.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
10 Books: Fallen Women
Fallen Women in literature actually has its own genre concerning women who gain agency through marriage and love affairs etc. and then, have their secrets found out or are violently mistreated and so, fall from this agency back down to either abject poverty or even worse, death. The literature of fallen women were most famous during the 1700s and 1800s with women being seen as more than alive for their agency in the 1900s and 2000s. Be that as it may, we can find fallen women in literature even in early eras of artistic movements. In Ancient Greece, we have the Orestian Trilogy and Sophocles’ Theban Plays which both contain fallen women, and in Shakespeare we can find fallen women in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and even in aspects of Julius Caesar. The fallen woman sub-genre has been around for ages throughout literary history, but became more and more famous in the decadent eras of the 1700s and 1800s partially because of the adornment of women of the aristocracy. The scandal that was created around women of the richer classes who required to hold themselves with decorum but ended up becoming involved with acts of degeneracy and the such. Readers were very much used to tragedies involving men and so, from the decadent courts of the Enlightenment and Romanticist Era we get women becoming more involved in tragedy, most obviously inspired by the richness and vulgarity of the Baroque and Rococo Styles. Towards the 1900s and 2000s, the ‘fallen woman’ sub-genre became more complex as instead of just having a rich woman who gains agency and falls into tragedy - we get a more complex story. We still have a woman either coming into riches or being above a certain social class, but then, we have a number of turns: familial tragedy, love stories, backdrops of war and sometimes the woman fell from grace before the plot line began and now, she is attempting to redeem herself. It certainly comes into the modern and post-modern eras with style and poise.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
Top 10 Summer Reads
Everyone is looking for the perfect summer read and everyone wants something different. So what I did (just for you) was created a list of some of my favorite/most highly recommended books. Here you have it, the perfect list of novels to get you through a long summer!
By Mary Knutson6 years ago in Geeks
"Le Morte d'Arthur" by Thomas Malory
When I was a little girl, like a lot of other small children, I liked reading the Arthurian Tales in children’s form. There were so many of them: The Sword in the Stone, The Knights of the Round Table, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Lancelot and Guinevere etc. But the best thing is that as I grew up, they got more and more sophisticated until I was fifteen and found the two volumes of Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory. It was like discovering a diamond after having nothing but crystals - there weren’t very many words for having the real thing in my hands. I am going to admit I read both volumes in the same day because I just couldn’t put it down. It was everything I’d ever wanted - an adult book made from the books I read as a child. This book completely changed me and changed what I thought about the children’s stories of my younger days. They really did come from other things. That was all a well and good theory until we got on to the fairy tales and Charles Perrault. Then it just got creepy and weird.
By Annie Kapur6 years ago in Geeks
