And it is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy so by my standards this is not too hard. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top,” he said. Written with few paragraph breaks, eschewing character names for descriptions, Appiah admitted that Milkman could be seen as “challenging, but in the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.” “Anna Burns’s utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. “None of us has ever read anything like this before,” said Appiah, announcing the win at a dinner at the Guildhall in London. It is “incredibly original”, according to the Booker’s chair of judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. The experimental novel, Burns’s third, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl, known as “middle sister”, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman.
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“Goon Squad”’s formal daring - a key section is rendered as a PowerPoint presentation - tempered by nuanced characterization and a sombre, nostalgic tone, feels both like a finale to the works that preceded it (such as Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”) and a sign of things to come (Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station”).Įgan herself followed up “Goon Squad” in 2017 with “ Manhattan Beach,” a brilliant historical family saga that cleaved to more traditional storytelling strategies. Looking back, the publication of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which won Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010, can be seen as a bridge in literary fiction between the hyper-ironic experimental novels of the aughts and the more reflective, ideologically charged work that followed. Stuart Hughes has written a new introduction for this edition. The abridgment, prepared by the German scholar Helmut Werner, with the blessing of the Spengler estate, consists of selections from the original (translated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson) linked by explanatory passages which have been put into English by Arthur Helps. As the face of Germany and Europe as a whole continues to change each day, The Decline of the West cannot be ignored. His challenging views have led to harsh criticism over the years, but the knowledge and eloquence that went into his sweeping study of Western culture have kept The Decline of the West alive. A twentieth-century Cassandra, Oswald Spengler thoroughly probed the origin and fate of our civilization, and the result can be (and has been) read as a prophesy of the Nazi regime. In all its various editions, it has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Since its first publication in two volumes between 1918-1923, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and most talked about books of our time. |