Essays

Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) was a shooting star in the firmament of 16th-century France, a poet, jurist, essayist and philologist who graduated from the University of Orleans at the age of 22, was appointed court magistrate also at the age of 22 and became a member of Parliament the following year, two years before the legal minimum age, for which he was granted special dispensation by the King of France, Henry II.
He was appointed by the French crown as a member of the special (…)

We have compared the word-counts of the considerable number of translations into English from other languages on our site – 499 at latest count – with the following results : - ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN THE ORIGINAL THE TRANSLATIONS OF RUSSIAN TEXTS INTO ENGLISH HAVE AN AVERAGE OF 33% MORE WORDS THAN THE ORIGINAL THE TRANSLATIONS OF GERMAN TEXTS INTO ENGLISH HAVE AN AVERAGE OF 9% MORE WORDS THAN THE (…)

Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the history of professional sports, the corruption of of the most important event in the American sporting calendar, the World Series of baseball, in 1919.
To quote from his vivid account :
"There was (…)

With the help of modern technology and a clever engineering student, we have analysed in depth the vocabulary in 25 of the most famous one-volume works in the history of Western literature – celebrated texts by Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck.
We have simply measured the number of (…)

One is first and foremost captivated by the sheer lyrical beauty of the poem, from the first of the seventy-five quatrains (or rubaiyats) :
- 1 - Awake ! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight : And Lo ! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
and the stirring early cry :
- 7 - Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling : The Bird of Time has but a little way To (…)

There are no doubt some novels missing from this compendium, but there can be no doubt that these 97 masterpieces from Albania, Austria (3), China, Columbia, Czechia, Egypt (2), England (22), France (24), Germany (9), Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan (2), Norway, Peru (2), Poland, Portugal, Russia (11), Scotland, Spain, Sweden and the U.S.A. (8) have all scaled the very highest heights of literary achievement in the novel form.
A summary analysis of this table by author can be seen (…)

None of these 92 novels — from Albania (2), Austria (3), Belgium (2), Canada, Egypt (4), England (21), Finland, France (18), Germany (4), Hungary, India, Ireland (2), Italy, Japan (9), Mexico (3), Peru (4), Portugal, Russia (3), Scotland, South Africa (2) and the U.S.A. (8) — were included in Our selection of the world’s greatest novels, although they are all worthy candidates for the distinction of appearing there in the august company of Don Quixote, Les Misérables, War and Peace, The (…)

INDEX
Citations
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)
Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope (1857)
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens (1857)
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859)
Adam Bede, by George Eliot (1859)
The Mill on The Floss, by George Eliot (1860)
Silas Marner, by George Eliot (1861)
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1861)
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens (1865)
The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope (1867)
The Mystery of (…)

I LOVE AWFULLY BAD WRITING
I love awfully bad writing. Indeed I can say (with all due modesty) that I am quite good at it myself. This might explain why I am fascinated by the annual Bulwyer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening to a novel.
Every year since 1984 San Jose State University has been offering generous prizes to those who compose the worst introductory paragraphs to imagined novels.
This year marks the 21st year of the contest which was inspired by Edward George (…)

An interesting contribution to the debate about spelling reform, from the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A PLAN FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF ENGLISH SPELLING
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The onle kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” (…)