The stacks

This is a thematic grouping of posts on this site as well as their associated ‘shelves’ on Bookshop. The Book Hold’s Bookshop site is here.

Fictions of authority

These books exemplify and explore the dictator novel and its legacy, beginning with the dictator novel in Latin America.

• A brief outline of the core readings is here.
• The Bookshop shelf of the core readings is here.

Bloc experiments

This shelf of works serves as an introduction to and overview of experimental literature out of Eastern Europe, from before, during, and after the Soviet experiment.

• A “syllabus” of these works is given here.
• The Bookshop shelf is here.

Salidas

The books discussed in this series offer an occasion to reflect, cumulatively, on the legacy of realism and its discontents in novels out of Spain, from 1945 to the present.

• I introduce this series here.
• Relevant works available on Bookshop are collected in this Bookshop shelf.

Contre-voyages

The purpose of this series is to reflect on a moment, roughly between the two world wars, in French literature, in which a group of writers and thinkers faced head on the troubled legacy of travel writing, often serving as a prelude to colonization.

• I introduce this series here.
• Relevant works available on Bookshop are collected in this Bookshop shelf.

Literature under fascism in Italy

This series is an attempt to consider novels written before, during, and after the rise and fall of fascism in Italy, 1922–1945. Posts now up include:

• Part 1, on Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror (1922)
• Part 2, on Calvino’s The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947)
• Part 3, on Ortese’s The Iguana (1965)