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glowing-fish posted:It also reflects differences in age and country. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, "The Gulag Archipelago" was a very easy to book find at second hand stores. I think this was because it was a popular book in the United States in the anti-communist 80's. But he might be much less well known outside of the US (and Russia, of course.) Maybe it's just anecdotal, but I see the first volume - the old, grey paperback version - of Gulag Archipelago all the time in used book stores but I've only come across a copy of the second volume once and I've never seen the third. I imagine people picked it up when Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel but couldn't make it through all three volumes. Or maybe their opinion changed when Solzhenitsyn started criticizing Western society, too. He was an interesting guy, David Remnick wrote a couple of good stories about him for the New Yorker a while back. Is anyone here familiar with Hamsun? He's a name that pops up occasionally in Amazon's recommendations for me, but I don't know anything about his books.
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Feb 18, 2014 19:36
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inktvis posted:With Hamsun, anything written before 1900 is worth tracking down (Hunger, Pan, Mysteries, Victoria) - really fantastic books with a sort of late-Romantic fixation on impulse and irrational behaviour, like if Notes from the Underground was rewritten as a pitiless Nordic fairytale. Awesome, thanks! I think Mysteries is the one that's popped up most recently, I'll be sure to check it out later this year. glowing-fish posted:Of course, even Steinbeck was an outlier, but he was a popular writer of his time, as were many of the other writers who gained the Nobel Prize in the middle of the 20th century. I think it's interesting how some writers were less popular than you'd assume. For example, when Malcolm Cowley put together The Portable Faulkner in 1946, most of those novels were out of print. It wasn't until after he won the Nobel in 1949 that Faulkner started winning Pulitzers, too (for A Fable and The Reivers).
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Feb 19, 2014 16:02
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