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/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19367 Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. 1997.
The God of Small Things was written by Arundhati Roy, who was trained as an architect, is married and a mother of two children, writes film scripts and engages in social and environmental projects as a political activist. Her first and to date only novel, published in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, won the Booker Prize in the same year and has enjoyed an immense worldwide success, having been translated in about 40 languages. The multifaceted novel appeals to a wide audience because it is about hope and disillusionment in a family over three generations in “exotic” Southern India, and because it is mysterious, historical, poetic, postcolonial and postmodern all at the same time. However, its great popular and academic acclaim has not gone without criticism. Marta Dvorak argues that the novel, written in English, criticizes repression in India and global U.S. hegemony while profiting from commodifying an exoticised version of India for Western taste i
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10304 Pratchett, Terry. Small Gods. 1992.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8276 Godwin, William. Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794.
Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams appeared in 1794, fifteen months after the publication of Godwin's landmark Enquiry Concerning Political Justice . The preface to the novel, which was omitted from the first edition, articulates its broad continuity with Godwin's critique of government in Political Justice : It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man. The novel, however, is not simply a piece of social realism, as its title might suggest. On the contr
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13788 Bowles, Paul. Things Gone and Things Still Here. 1977.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1412 Carr, Emily. The Book of Small. 1942.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2011 Piercy, Marge. Small Changes. 1973.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6978 Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. 1988.
Jamaica Kincaid’s brief if explosive book, A Small Place, comes from a long line of splenetic travel writers, a close cousin to Tobias Smollett’s Travels Through Italy and France (1766), and, more obviously, the Caribbean critique of V.S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (1962). Yet even among these, Kincaid stands alone through her audacious use of second-person and the fearlessness of her prose, which takes no prisoners in its efforts to show tourists the reality behind the resort. Part history lesson, and part polemic, the book departs from travel writing tradition by addressing the reader directly, creating an intimate, if often claustrophobic effect: “You disembark from your plane. You go through customs” (4). The book has understandably alienated many writers and politicians in her native Antigua, and in interviews Kincaid claimed she might be assassinated if she ever returned home. In America, no less a figure than New Yorker editor, Robert Go
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19620 Abse, Dannie. A Small Desperation. 1968.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26379 Sarton, May. The Small Room. 1961.
/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26847 Levy, Andrea. Small Island. 2004.
Published in 2004, Small Island is the fourth novel by British author Andrea Levy. The story of Jamaican immigrants to Britain during the 1940s, the novel received massive critical acclaim and won, among other awards, the Whitbread Book of the Year award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Orange Best of the Best Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. While her previous novels had been well received by critics and sold moderately well, the string of high-profile awards bestowed upon Small Island propelled Levy into the very heart of the British literary mainstream. The narrative structure of Small Island is complex in that it is both polyvocal and non-linear (accordingly, the structure of the summary that follows does not reflect that of the novel). Narrated by four different protagonists – English couple Queenie and Bernard Bligh and Jamaican couple Gilbert and Hortense Joseph – it both explores and traverses boundaries of ethnicity, class an
