This quote comes from Donna Tartt’s early work, The Secret History. Published in 1992 when Tartt was only 28 years old, The Secret History follows a close-knit and extremely exclusive group of friends who study classics at an elite liberal arts college in New England. Filled with classical allusions, mystery, melodrama and the occult, The Secret History is a dark, engaging and philosophical work. In 2014, Donna Tartt received the Pulitzer Prize for her bildungsroman-style epic novel The Goldfinch, despite some notable criticism from the upper echelons of the literary world.
The relationships between the characters in Wuthering Heights change drastically throughout the novel. Rejected as child and refused by his love, Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights as a man set on revenge. Through the novel, he manipulates nearly all of the characters around him—including his own son—and subjects them to both petty and disastrous cruelties. As Healthcliff fulfills his plans for revenge, he entangles himself more and more with the Earnshaws and the Lintons, always keeping his ultimate goal in mind: ownership of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. By taking both estates—the calm, cultivated Thrushcross Grange and the wild, tumultuous Wuthering Heights—Heathcliff would […]
Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is set in the West Egg, a fictional neighborhood on Long Island. The novel follows narrator Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled in the drama of the West Egg socialites including, above all, the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. Through grand affairs, intrigue and tragedy, The Great Gatsby explores the opulence, morality, society and decline of both the Roaring Twenties and the American Dream. Though many original reviewers condemned the novel as a decline from earlier works like This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, it is The Great Gatsby that has continued to solidify F. Scott Fitzgerald’s place in […]
This quote comes from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon,” published in the 2004 collection Oblivion: Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories 2002. “Good Old Neon” is posthumously narrated by Neal, an attractive and apparently successful American businessman who committed suicide by crashing his car. In a simple first-person monologue, Neal expresses his lifelong emotional torment at his self-proclaimed fraudulence and inability to ever be authentic. “Good Old Neon” devastatingly explores what it means to be authentic or lonely or successful or empty—or all of these at once. Like much of Wallace’s work, “Good Old Neon” peers into […]
Written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (more commonly called Alice in Wonderland) is a whimsical tale of a child exploring a fantasy land where nothing is ever as it seems, where logic is fallacy and where making sense won’t get you anywhere. Though a children’s story at heart, the dreamlike absurdity of the Alice in Wonderland characters, plot and language can be appreciated at any age. Alice, the child of a wealthy Victorian family, exemplifies logic, order and etiquette. Despite her age and child-like demeanor, Alice believes that there are rules and features […]
The first post of our new weekly feature, Words Wednesday, spotlights Salman Rushdie, one of our favorite contemporary authors. This quote comes from Salman Rushdie’s highly acclaimed and hugely controversial work The Satanic Verses. First published in 1988, the novel opens as two Indian expatriate friends, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from the sky after surviving a plane bombing. The two friends land on earth magically transformed into the archangel Gibreel and the devil himself. The novel follows the two characters as their new lives both diverge and intersect. Moving fluidly between plots spanning thousands of years, The Satanic Verses […]
Welcome to the newly revamped Books on the Wall website. We’re working hard to update our book poster collection by adding more novels, designs and sizes. Upcoming titles include The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston L’eroux (translated into English), Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. We’re also working on some new designs for smaller prints available in themed sets of two or three. If you can’t find the book poster or design you’re looking for, please feel free to send us your suggestions or request a custom design. We love to hear from our community. […]