Two German Dramas: Anatol, and The Weavers

I conclude this year's German Literature Month with the reading of two nineteenth century plays: Anatol and The Weavers.Anatol, written by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, and first published in 1893 is about a young man Anatol and his quest for the perfect love that would endure all. Divided into seven acts (the wikipedia informs me …

Forgotten Book: Oil! by Upton Sinclair (1927)

Does it surprise you to hear that Big corporate houses fund an election or that industrialists pay bribes on their way to setting up Big empires? If my guess is correct, your answer is also No. These things are so commonplace that one doesn't even bat an eyelid when hearing about them let alone question …

A Book for Easter: Resurrection by Lev Tolstoy

How does one react when one comes face to face with one's crime? Does one fake ignorance and turn away or does one accept one's wrong-doing and try to atone for it? This is the theme of Lev Tolstoy's last novel Resurrection, first published serially in 1899."All this happened,...because all these people... consider that there …

‘Scars and Chains’: Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

In 1953, a young psychiatrist was assigned to the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric hospital in  Algeria, at that time a colony of the French. Battling a host of racial prejudices that even used scientific studies to designate Africans as little more than animals, Frantz Fanon started documenting the cases that came to him even as the Algerian …

Forgotten Book: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

Imagine you are the one cooking for US President, Theodore Roosevelt. Then one day as you have served him  breakfast and are humming in the kitchen, you are told that the President has thrown out the plate of sausages. What will be your reaction - a quaking in the boots, palpitations of the heart, breaking …