Tag: novels

3,111 words

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. — Charles Baudelaire, epigraph to 2666

The British Prime Minister was asked during an interview to name his favorite novel, and the answer he gave was revealing. Sir Keir Starmer said he didn’t have a favorite novel. He didn’t have a favorite poem, either. This is a man who was the Director of Public Prosecutions, one of the highest appointments in the United Kingdom. I know that he had a good education because I was at school with him, although he evidently spent more time studying than I did. (more…)

1,525 words

Is it possible that one can be a dissident and still not be a dissident? That is, can one have dissidence thrust upon him for what he thinks rather than for what he feels? Academia is rife with people like this— those who naively believed in their own freedom of inquiry until they were canceled by corrupt elites who do not believe in freedom of inquiry. This is what happened to philosophy professor Harry Vanikin, and author Mark Gullick tells us his story in his new novel Vanikin in the Underworld. (more…)

3,098 words

Bill Hopkins (1928–2011) was a British Right-wing writer and intellectual who was associated in the 1950s with the so-called Angry Young Men, which was less a movement than a loose journalistic appellation for writers from mostly working- and middle-class backgrounds who were dubbed “angry” because of their disillusionment with post-Second World War British society. Some of the Angries hardly knew each other.

In 1957, Hopkins’ first novel, The Divine and the Decay, was published in London by MacGibbon & Kee. (more…)

1,137 words

Alex Kurtagić
Angel
London: Spradabach Publishing, 2022

Angel is a novel that follows the eponymous characters’ misadventures as he attempts failingly to negotiate life as an impoverished university student in the present-day United Kingdom. Angel is physically unprepossessing to the point of emaciation, a romantic who is out of place on a university campus that is replete with social justice warriors, hideously shrill feminists, activist professors, climate change zealots, loan-sharking foreign students, slovenly roommates, rigidly officious administrators, and very few allies. (more…)

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Fatal Friendship here.

1,987 words

Stephen Paul Foster
Fatal Friendship: A Philosophical Novel
Foster & Dobson, 2023

To subtitle one’s fiction A Philosophical Novel throws down a weighty gauntlet. Some novels which could be described as philosophical slip in and out of the discipline with ease, weaving speculative thought — and even direct mention of philosophers — into the profession of storytelling. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a good example. Other novels, such as Albert Camus’ The Outsider, are philosophical novels — in this case a core text of existentialism — without trying to be, not resorting to direct quotation or discussion. (more…)

1,765 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Frank Norris (1870-1902) was best known for MacTeague, a rough, unvarnished view of American life, although The Octopus (1900) demands attention as well. While Steinbeck wrote a memoir/paean to life in Salinas, The Octopus deals with ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Norris’s work, unlike Steinbeck’s careful imitation of Tolstoy, is exciting and more immediate than ever, concerned as it is with land and power. (more…)

1,873 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

California is a garden of Eden,
A paradise to live in or see,
But believe it or not,
You won’t find it so hot,
If you ain’t got the do re mi.
— Woody Guthrie (more…)

1,476 words

The following is being published in honor of Knut Hamsun’s 164th birthday on August 4.

It’s one thing to attempt to write a great novel. It’s something else entirely to write a novel to prove a point. The latter is what the young Knut Hamsun attempted to do in 1892 with his second novel, Mysteries. It was a good point, but that doesn’t necessarily make Mysteries a good novel. But it is still a good novel. Perhaps not a great one. (more…)

3,096 words

After Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch in 2013, a novel that won her a much-deserved Pulitzer. The novel has been described as a latter-day Dickensian work, hailed as “a soaring masterpiece” by the Washington Post and as “a triumph” by Stephen King. Does it soar? Is it a triumph?

The Goldfinch does fly, although there are times when it hovers. It is nevertheless a remarkably beautiful, well-crafted Bildungsroman about Theo Decker, a pre-adolescent youth in New York City who is on the cusp of a new beginning. (more…)

91 words / 1:59:58

Greg Johnson did a solo Ask Me Anything on the last episode of Counter-Currents Radio, and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:01:30 Did you have a mid-life crisis?
00:10:45 Liberalism and Covid (more…)

You can buy Fenek Solère’s Resistance here.

1,307 words

Greg Johnson: Can you give us a brief introduction about yourself for our readers?

Fenek Solère: Being a life-long advocate for White Nationalism and European culture, wherever it has taken root in the world, I have published four novels: The Partisan (2014), Rising (2017), Kraal (2019), and now Resistance (2021), as well as over 350 articles, short stories, and poems at Counter-Currents, European Civil War, The New European Conservative, Europa Sun, Defend Europa and Patriotic Alternative. (more…)

1,918 words

A. E. van Vogt
Slan
Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1946

Science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt’s first novel-length work, Slan, became a classic, notable for being a pioneer in the mutant protagonist genre that gave us the X-Men comic book series and its cinematic spinoffs. (more…)