Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister doesn’t focus on class war, a projected future or the awakening of an individual under authoritarian rule. It follows an exceptional man’s loss of all that makes his life […]
Culture / Dystopia / Literature / Philippic / Politics
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The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]
Culture / Dystopia / Literature / Philippic / Politics
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The Dystopia Files: When the Sleeper Wakes
H.G. Wells originally published When the Sleeper Awakes in 1898 as a serial in The Graphic, an illustrated London newspaper. In his preface to the 1910 edition, The Sleeper Awakes, he expressed disappointment with the […]
Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: The Iron Heel
Jack London’s political dystopia, The Iron Heel, published in 1905, is not so fantastic as it is relevant, not so prophetic as it is cogent. The question the novel leaves you with, in this age […]
Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: We
Yergeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We is not the first dystopian novel. There was The Iron Heel (1905) by Jack London and The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G Wells, Russian translations of which Zamyatin edited. It […]
Academia / Culture / Literature / Poetry
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High-tech Poetry Bitch
They had big dictums, deep erudition and cunning linguistics. Marianne Moore translated La Fontaine’s easygoing French into an English of conspicuous difficulty. In Pound’s hands the rudimentary Italian of the troubadours and bare-bones Chinese of […]