The calendar turns, and once again a lively procession of books, images, films, and music leaves copyright behind and steps into the ever-growing public domain! On this year's Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the words of Wallace Stevens, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein, and in the US a bevy of brilliant books including William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, and, in their original German, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:
- works by people who died in 1955, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America);
- works by people who died in 1975, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);
- films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1929 (relevant solely to the United States).
Some of you may have been following our advent-style countdown calendar which revealed day-by-day through December our highlights for these new public domain entrants. The last window was opened yesterday, and while such a format was fun for the slow reveal, for the sake of a good gorgeable list we’ve exploded the calendar out into a digestible array below. Enjoy!
Entering the public domain in the US
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As I Lay Dying is a Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner, consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. The title is derived from William Marris’s 1925 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the similar themes of both works.
The novel traces the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, as well as the motives—noble or selfish—they show on the journey. It uses a stream-of-consciousness writing technique and varying chapter lengths, and is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters.
Faulkner said that he wrote the novel from midnight to 4:00 a.m. over the course of six weeks and that he did not change a word of it. He spent the first eight hours of his twelve-hour shift at the University of Mississippi Power House shoveling coal or directing other works and the remaining four hours handwriting his manuscript on unlined onionskin paper. As I Lay Dying represents a progenitor of the Southern Renaissance, reflecting on being, existence, and other existential metaphysics of everyday life, and helped to solidify Faulkner’s reputation as a pioneer, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of stream of consciousness. (Wikipedia)
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Swallows and Amazons is a children’s adventure novel by English author Arthur Ransome. It is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series, followed by Swallowdale.
Set in the summer of 1929 in England’s Lake District, the book relates the outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays. They sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow and meet the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. When the children meet, they agree to join forces against a common enemy – the Blacketts’ uncle Jim Turner whom they call “Captain Flint” (after the parrot in Treasure Island).
The book was inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his friends, the Altounyans, to sail. At the time, Ransome had been working as a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, but decided to become a full-time author rather than go abroad as a foreign correspondent. Three of the Altounyan children’s names are adopted directly for the Walker family. However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay the Altounyan connections, changing the initial dedication of Swallows and Amazons and writing a new foreword which gave other sources. (Wikipedia)
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Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc^2, which arises from special relativity, has been called “the world’s most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.
In 1905, sometimes described as his *annus mirabilis* (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers. In them, he outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity, and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation. A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In 1917, Einstein introduced the concepts of spontaneous emission and stimulated emission, the latter of which is the core mechanism behind the laser and maser, and which helped lay the groundwork for later developments in physics such as quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics. (Wikipedia)
Works at Wikisource
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The Weatherhouse is the second novel by Anna “Nan” Shepherd, a Scottish modernist writer and poet. The novel concerns interactions between people in a small rural Scottish community. It belongs to the great line of Scottish fiction dealing with the complex interactions of small communities, and especially the community of women — a touching and hilarious network of mothers, daughters, spinsters and widows. It is also a striking meditation on the nature of truth, the power of human longing and the mystery of being.
Shepherd published three works of fiction. Her short non-fiction book The Living Mountain, inspired by her love for hillwalking, is the book for which she is best known and has been quoted as an influence by prominent nature writers. The landscape and weather of this area play a major role in her novels and provide a focus for her poetry.
Shepherd’s fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in women’s lives. All three novels assign a major role to the landscape and weather in small northern Scottish communities they describe. (Wikipedia)
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Not Without Laughter* is the first debut novel of Langston Hughes, the American writer, activist, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
The novel portrays African-American life in Kansas in the 1910s, focusing on the effects of class and religion on the community. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family—his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer—Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of Black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.
Hughes said that *Not Without Laughter* is semi-autobiographical, and that a good portion of the characters and setting included in the novel are based on his memories of growing up in Lawrence, Kansas. A review in *The New York Times* said that the novel is “very slow, even tedious, reading in its early chapters, but once it gains its momentum it moves as swiftly as a jazz rhythm”. (Wikipedia)
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Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stevens’s first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).
Many of Stevens’s poems deal with the making of art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached 40 years of age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence titled “Phases” in the November 1914 edition of Poetry) was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with Santayana. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary scholar Harold Bloom, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. (Wikipedia)
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Narcissus and Goldmund (in German, Narziß und Goldmund), also published in English as Death and the Lover, is a novel written by the German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. At its publication, it was considered Hesse’s literary triumph.
The novel is the story of a young man, Goldmund (German for “Gold mouth”), who wanders aimlessly throughout Medieval Germany after leaving a Catholic monastery school in search of what could be described as “the meaning of life”. With the help of Narcissus, a gifted young teacher, and following an epiphanic experience with a beautiful Gypsy woman, Goldmund leaves the monastery and embarks on a wandering existence. He has numerous love affairs, studies art, and encounters human existence at its ugliest when the Black Death devastates the region. Eventually, he is reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot.
Like most of Hesse’s works, the main theme of this book is the wanderer’s struggle to find himself, as well as the Jungian union of polar opposites (Mysterium Coniunctionis). Goldmund represents nature and the “feminine conscious mind” (but also anima, a man’s unconscious), while Narcissus represents science and logic and God and the “masculine conscious mind” (but also animus, a woman’s unconscious).
A film adaptation, directed by the Austrian Oscar-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky, was released in 2020. (Wikipedia)
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All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American pre-Code epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Lewis Milestone, it stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, and William Bakewell.
The movie follows a group of German students moved to enlist in the army as part of the new 2nd Company. Their romantic delusions are quickly shattered during their brief but rigorous training under the abusive Sergeant Himmelstoss. After being sent to the Western Front, their idealism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.
Considered a realistic and harrowing account of warfare in World War I, the film opened to wide acclaim in the United States and made the American Film Institute’s first 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1997. (Wikipedia)
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Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925. In 1931 she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson, and in 1933 divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One. At the beginning of the Second World War Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings – including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter in 1944 – and lithographs. She died in a fire at her studio in 1975. (Wikipedia)
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Vile Bodies is the second novel by Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books, and a prolific journalist and book reviewer. It satirises London’s post–First World War “bright young things” — a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in London — and the press coverage around them. Waugh originally considered the title Bright Young Things but changed it; the published title echoes a narrator’s remark on crowds and parties: “Those vile bodies”.
The novel follows a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, who hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Waugh’s acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.
The book shifts in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book’s composition). Critics have noted the novel’s fragmented scenes, jump-cuts, and telephone dialogue, often linking its method to cinema and to modernist effects. Some have defended the novel’s downbeat ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.
David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence in writing his song “Aladdin Sane”, and a film adaptation, written and directed by Stephen Fry, was released in 2003. (Wikipedia)
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The End of the World is the fourth book by the English diplomat and writer Geoffrey Dennis. It earned him the Hawthornden Prize in 1930.
The book is a work of speculative, non-narrative science fiction musing over the world’s end. “Here it will be asked”, Dennis writes, “in what way the world’s death is most likely to befall? and when? and what after?” True to his purpose, the book is organized into four sections: “How?” (including comet, drought, crash, god, and more), “When?” (this year; next year; some time; never), “Which First?” (man or earth), and “What After?”.
“These are guesses,” writes Dennis, “not knowledge. Like its origin, the destiny of the world is unknown.” (Wikipedia)
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Charles Parker Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Parker primarily played the alto saxophone.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.
His style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards, a practice known as contrafact and still common in jazz today. Examples include “Ornithology” (which borrows the chord progression of jazz standard “How High the Moon” and is said to be co-written with trumpet player Little Benny Harris), and “Moose The Mooche”. The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop, but it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and toward composing their own material. Parker contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones.
Miles Davis once said, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” (Wikipedia)
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Years of Grace is the first book by the American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Margaret Ayer Barnes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1931.
The story, beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the 1930s, chronicles the life of Jane Ward Carver from her teens to age 54. This novel follows many of the same themes as Barnes’s other works. Centering on the social manners of upper middle class society, her female protagonists are often traditionalists, struggling to uphold conventional morality in the face of changing social climates. Barnes’s alma mater Bryn Mawr College, along with the characters of college presidents M. Carey Thomas and Marion Park, figure prominently in this work.
The New York Times commented that “this story of the death of an old order and the birth of a new one, of the perpetually renewed conflict between succeeding generations... holds the reader’s attention to the end.” Despite the success of Years of Grace, it is not Barnes’s best-known work; that honor belongs to Dishonored Lady, a play she co-wrote with Edward Sheldon, which was adapted twice into film. (Wikipedia)
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Hell-Bound Train is a 1930 film written and directed by James and Eloyce Gist. A self-taught husband-and-wife team with a shared religious mission, they produced at least three silent films for African American church audiences, touring them across the United States. Shown alongside sermons, these works used cinema as a vehicle for evangelism. In Hell-Bound Train — which Eloyce is said to have rewritten, re-edited, and partly refilmed after James’s initial version — the viewer passes from carriage to carriage as the filmmakers stage various “Jazz Age” sins, including dancing, drinking, and gambling, all overseen by a mischievous devil conductor. Though Hell-Bound Train has gained some renewed attention via Kino Lorber’s Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set and a brief run on the Criterion Channel, this film — one of the few surviving silent works by an African American woman — is still often absent from retrospectives on early women filmmakers, perhaps because of its modest production values and overtly moralizing tone. (Wikipedia)
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Hannah Arendt was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase “the banality of evil”.
In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France she was detained as an alien, but she escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished. (Wikipedia)
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The Man Without Qualities (in German Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil, published in parts from 1930 to 1943.
The novel is a “story of ideas”, which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s last days. The plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society. The book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and no one single theme dominates.
The story takes place in 1913 in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which Musil refers to by the playful term Kakanien. Part I, titled A Sort of Introduction, is an introduction to the protagonist, a mathematician named Ulrich whose ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life make him “a man without qualities”. In Part II, Pseudoreality Prevails, Ulrich joins preparations for a celebration in honor of 70 years of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. Part III, entitled Into the Millennium (The Criminals), is about Ulrich’s sister Agathe. They experience a mystically incestuous stirring upon meeting after their father’s death.
Musil worked on the novel for more than twenty years: his detailed portrait of a decaying fin de siècle world has strong autobiographical features. Musil’s almost daily preoccupation with writing left his family in dire financial straits. (Wikipedia)
Read German original on Project Gutenberg
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Ash Wednesday is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem”, Ash Wednesday, with a base of Dante’s Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. Ash Wednesday and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
The poem’s title comes from the Western Christian fast day that marks the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. It is a poem about the difficulty of religious belief, and concerned with personal salvation in an age of uncertainty. In it, Eliot’s poetic persona, one who has lacked faith in the past, has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith.
The initial reception of Ash Wednesday was largely positive, though many of the more secular literati found its groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that “‘Ash Wednesday’ is one of the most moving poems he [Eliot] has written, and perhaps the most perfect”. (Wikipedia)
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Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Mann was a member of the hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901). Further major novels include The Magic Mountain (1924), the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), and Doctor Faustus (1947); he also wrote short stories and novellas, including Death in Venice (1912).
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland and when World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime. (Wikipedia)
Works at Project Gutenberg
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The Murder at the Vicarage is a work of detective fiction by the British writer Agatha Christie. It is the first novel to feature the character of Miss Marple and her village of St Mary Mead (characters that had previously appeared in short stories).
The story is set in the quiet English village of St Mary Mead, where life is seemingly peaceful until Colonel Protheroe, the local magistrate and a widely disliked man, is found shot dead in the vicar’s study. The vicar, Leonard Clement, is the narrator of the story. Just before the murder, he had remarked that “anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world a service” — a comment that comes back to haunt him.
Several suspects quickly emerge, as well as Miss Marple, who proves, though she appears at first as a nosy old spinster, to have unmatched observational skills and a deep understanding of human nature. (Wikipedia)
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The Castle (in German, *Das Schloss*) is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as “K.” arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. Kafka died before he could finish the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there.” Dark and at times surreal, *The Castle* is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. (Wikipedia)
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Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Evans’ published his first photos at the age of 27. Much of Evans’ New Deal work uses the large format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.
Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the George Eastman Museum.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. The Great Depression years of 1935–36 were a period of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1936, employed by the National Recovery Administration, he photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The photographs became iconic and were praised for effectively capturing the negative effects of the Great Depression in the American South. Between 1940 and 1959, Evans was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects. (Wikipedia)
Works at Library of Congress
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Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It was written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (“The Uneasiness in Civilization”).
Exploring what Freud saw as a clash between the desire for individuality and the expectations of society, the book is considered one of Freud’s most important and widely read works, and was described in 1989 by historian Peter Gay as one of the most influential and studied books in the field of modern psychology.
The book espouses a theory grounded in the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. The primary tension originates from an individual attempting to find instinctive freedom, and civilization’s contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts. Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild resentment as it clashes with the reality principle.
Primitive instincts—for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification—are harmful to the collective wellbeing of a human community. The historical development of laws that prohibit violence, murder, rape, and adultery, he argued, is an inherent quality of civilization that gives rise to perpetual feelings of discontent among individuals. (Wikipedia)
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The Far-Away Bride is the most famous book by the English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer Stella Benson. It was published in the United States first in 1930 and as Tobit Transplanted in Britain in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for English writers in 1932.
The novel deals with a family of Russian émigrés in Manchuria. Its characters are the old, grumbling and tearfully sentimental Russian intellectual, Malinin; his disheveled, kind-hearted and unbearable wife, Anna; and Seryozha, their resourceful 19-year-old son. Spending their time in laziness, indulging in exaggerated Russian disorder and comical quarrels growing out of every trifle, they are incongruously happy. The humorous and adventurous action of the novel starts when Seryozha sets out, on foot, on a business trip to the Korean city of Seoul (where he must recover 200 yens); it is there that he finds his “far-away bride” — a charming and whimsical Russian girl who has already broken seven hearts and whose heart he finally conquers.
Benson described the novel as an “accurate modernization” of the Book of Tobit, a work of Second Temple Jewish literature dating to the 3rd or early 2nd century BC; The New York Times described The Far-Away Bride, rather, as a “spirited parody of it.” Benson’s novel, writes the reviewer, is “a truly felicitous comedy of the human personality”. (Wikipedia)
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit, Catholic priest, scientist, paleontologist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher. He investigated the theory of evolution from a perspective influenced by Henri Bergson and Christian mysticism, writing multiple scientific and religious works on the subject, his most popular being The Phenomenon of Man, published posthumously in 1955. His mainstream scientific achievements include his palaeontological research in China, taking part in the discovery of the significant Peking Man fossils from the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing. His more speculative ideas, sometimes criticized as pseudoscientific, have included a vitalist conception of the Omega Point. Along with Vladimir Vernadsky, he contributed to the development of the concept of the noosphere.
In 1962, the Holy Office issued a warning regarding Teilhard’s works, alleging ambiguities and doctrinal errors without specifying them. Some eminent Catholic figures, including Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, have made positive comments on some of his ideas since. The response to his writings by scientists has been divided. His work was controversial to some scientists and religious leaders because Teilhard combined theology and metaphysics with science.
Teilhard served in World War I as a stretcher-bearer. He received several citations, and was awarded the Médaille militaire and the Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. (Wikipedia)
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Miss Mole is the seventh novel by the English novelist, children’s writer and mountaineer Emily Hilda Daniell, writing as E. H. Young. It won the James Tait Black Award for fiction.
The novel follows Miss Hannah Mole, who has for twenty years earned her living precariously as a governess or companion to a succession of difficult old women. Now, aged forty, a thin and shabby figure, she returns to Radstowe, the lovely city of her youth. Here she is, if not exactly welcomed, at least employed as housekeeper by the pompous Reverend Robert Corder, whose daughters are sorely in need of guidance. But even the dreariest situation can be transformed into an adventure by the indomitable Miss Mole. Blessed with imagination, wit and intelligence, she wins the affection of Ethel and her nervous sister Ruth. But her past holds a secret that, if brought to life, would jeopardise everything. (Wikipedia)
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Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Born in Guildford, his early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse’s fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. Wodehouse was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. Early in his career Wodehouse would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers. (Wikipedia)
Works at Project Gutenberg
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The Defense (in Russian, Zashchita Luzhinais) is the third novel written by Vladimir Nabokov after he had emigrated to Berlin. It appeared first under Nabokov’s pen name V. Sirin in the Russian émigré quarterly Sovremennye zapiski and was thereafter published by the émigré publishing house Slovo as The Luzhin Defense in Berlin.
The novel tells the story of Luzhin. As a young boy, unattractive, withdrawn, sullen, he takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent’s unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault.
The character of Luzhin is based on Curt von Bardeleben, a chess master Nabokov knew personally, and Nabokov links the events in the central chapters to moves as encountered in chess problems. The book was adapted to film in 2000, as The Luzhin Defence. It was directed by Marleen Gorris, and starred John Turturro as Luzhin. (Wikipedia)
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The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatsoever of any character’s thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema and is considered part of the hardboiled genre, which Hammett played a major part in popularizing.
The novel follows Sam Spade, a private detective in San Francisco, in partnership with Miles Archer. The beautiful “Miss Wonderley” hires them to follow Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her sister. Archer takes the first stint but is found shot dead that night. “Miss Wonderley” is soon revealed to be an acquisitive adventuress named Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who is involved in the search for a black statuette of unknown but substantial value. Red herrings abound.
Although Hammett himself worked for a time as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco (and used his given name, Samuel, for the story’s protagonist), Hammett asserted that “Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.” (Wikipedia)
Read on Faded Page and Standard Books
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Roger Mais was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.
He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most appearing in Public Opinion and Focus, with others collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. He wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays, as well as three novels: The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), Brother Man (1954), and Black Lightning (1955).
Mais’ topics most frequently were the social injustice and inequality suffered by black, poor Jamaicans. Accused of sedition for writing the article “Now We Know,” a 1944 denunciation of the British Empire, the Jamaican novelist was tried, convicted and imprisoned for six months. His political activism, anti-colonial writing, and imprisonment helped galvanize Jamaican nationalism. (Wikipedia)
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Saadat Hasan Manto was a Pakistani writer, playwright and novelist from Punjab, who is regarded as the greatest short-story author in Urdu literature. He was active from 1933 during British rule till his death in 1955 after independence.
Writing mainly in Urdu, he produced 22 collections of short stories, a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays, and two collections of personal sketches. He is best known for his stories about the partition of India, which he opposed, immediately following independence in 1947. Manto’s most notable work has been archived by Rekhta.
Manto was tried six times for alleged obscenity in his writings; thrice before 1947 in British India, and thrice after independence in 1947 in Pakistan, but was never convicted. He started his literary career translating the works of Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Russian writers such as Chekhov and Gorky. His first story was “Tamasha”, based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar. His final works, which grew from the social climate and his own financial struggles, reflected an innate sense of human impotency towards darkness and contained satire that verged on dark comedy, as seen in his last story, “Toba Tek Singh”. (Wikipedia)
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Insatiability (in Polish Nienasycenie) is a speculative fiction novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). It is Witkiewicz’s third novel, considered by some to be his best.
Consisting of two parts — Przebudzenie (Awakening) and Obłęd (The Madness) — the novel takes place in the future, circa 2000. Following a battle, modeled after the Bolshevik revolution, Poland is overrun by the army of the last and final Mongol conquest. The nation becomes enslaved to the Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called DAVAMESK B 2 which takes away their abilities to think and to mentally resist. East and West become one, in faceless misery fueled by sexual instincts.
The book combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion, and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland, the postwar foreign domination as well as the totalitarian mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art. (Wikipedia)
Read more about Witkiewicz’s artworks in our essay “Documenting Drugs” by Juliette Bretan
