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.

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)