Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Literature”
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Kafka Asked Max Brod to Burn Everything. Max Brod Did Not.
Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, of tuberculosis, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. He was 40. He left three unfinished novels, a substantial body of shorter fiction, letters, and diaries, and a note to his friend Max Brod instructing him to burn all of it — “everything I leave behind me… in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread.
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Paris in the Twenties Was Not a Party
The mythology of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris has been so thoroughly processed into glamour that the actual conditions of the period have become nearly unrecognizable inside it: a city still rebuilding after the war, full of American expatriates living cheaply on the dollar-franc exchange rate, several of them drinking themselves toward early death, most of them producing work of lasting importance under circumstances that were genuinely precarious and not always recognizably fun.
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The Summer Mary Shelley Invented Science Fiction
In June 1816, Mary Godwin was eighteen years old and living in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron’s physician John Polidori, and Byron’s companion Claire Clairmont. The weather was catastrophically bad — cold, dark, and rainy throughout a summer that should have been Mediterranean. They were indoors most of the time, reading German ghost stories aloud and eventually agreeing on a competition: each of them would write a supernatural tale.
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What Siberia Made of Dostoevsky
In December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was led into Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg, bound to a post with two other condemned men, and prepared for execution by firing squad. He was 28. He had been convicted of involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of liberal intellectuals who had read and discussed banned texts, and the sentence was death. He had been in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months.