Folders
- Crime
- Detective
- Didactic
- Fantasy
- Historical
- Horror
- Philosophical
- Psychological
- Realism
- Science Fiction
- Young Adult
Recently Modified
There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don’t want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don’t, really. They can’t bring themselves to admit they’re alcoholics, or that liquor’s got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone – so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or…
The Man with the Golden Arm is one of the first post-WWII era novels to document the difficulties soldiers experienced when readjusting to civilian life. Nelson Algren, the author, himself served in WWII as a medical corpsan, and he intended to write novels about experiences he had on the battlefield. After coming back to Chicago and observing how his fellow soldiers had trouble integrating into…
Six Nights with the Washingtonians is a collection of temperance stories inspired by Timothy Shay Arthur’s real experiences with the rehabilitation stories he heard from the Washington Temperance Society.
This book is a collection of fictional tales warning young readers about alcohol, which was somewhat typical for temperance movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was published in London by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and pushed the framework at the time that alcohol was itself inherently dangerous in its consumption of personal agency and moral sensibilities. To be…
There are various anecdotes floating around about Walt Whitman writing this temperance novel while heavily drinking himself, which does explain why critics have called it “an incoherent and often aesthetically dissatisfying text.” The historian David Reynolds biographical accounts of Whitman include a claim that he wrote the novel in three days while drinking heavily. However, there seems to be…
Some scholars argue that “Maria Lamas” is likely a pseudonym used by a female author in order to publish a work that would otherwise be seen as too transgressive or gruesome for a woman to write. The titular female protagonist, Helen More, is a woman born into a wealthy family and constrained by both patriarchal institutions and the influence of alcohol on herself and the men in her life. Rather…
The Moonstone: A Romance is one of the earliest modern detective novels and strikes a little close to home. The namesake jewel in the novel is associated explicitly with Chandra, the god representing the Moon in Hinduism, which is also what my name translates to. It also helped popularize the trope of jewels being taken from a colonized and oppressed peoples before being taken again through an…
I’ve often thought of Aldous Huxley as the bastard child of H.P. Lovecraft and Carl Jung, conceived in a pile of experimental psychedelics. You can find a lot of Huxley’s anxieties about a changing world reflected in Brave New World, from the commercial commodification of art and culture as a form of mental dissociation through consumption to the concerns about European genetic pools…
“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get…
This novel was the second-most popular book of its time right behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
https://www.amazon.com/Party-Girl-SECOND-PG-Version-ebook/dp/B0DJWTMV9B
Pages
T
There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don’t want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don’t, really. They can’t bring themselves to admit they’re alcoholics, or that liquor’s got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone – so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or…