Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺 Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

Another book title mentioned as "blowing up" on TikTok is Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. A film version is coming to Netflix. https://t.co/Cwycj8mxJA

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

The Publishers Weekly bestsellers list for 1923: 1) Black Oxen, Gertrude Atherton; 2) His Children's Children, Arthur Train; 3) The Enchanted April, "Elizabeth"; 4) Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis; 5) The Dim Lantern, Temple Bailey...

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

After reading a New York Times profile of American romance novelist Colleen Hoover, who sells millions of copies and tops bestseller lists, I decided to buy and read one of her books. I chose her novel, Verity. I'm a couple chapters in. It's not going well, I'm afraid.

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

@PolisLoizou Nabokov's Lolita was turned down by virtually every major American publisher and was eventually published in Paris — like James Joyce's Ulysses and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, both banned. In Kubrick's film version, Lolita's age is changed to 14. She's 12 in the novel.

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” was translated by Baudelaire and illustrated by Manet. In France, Poe is usually referred to as “Edgar Poe”, without the middle name. https://t.co/kLxWsRIRI9

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

The "end of innocence" story of the young American woman in Italy is a classic theme. In Henry James's novella Daisy Miller, she's an innocent and flirtatious American girl who, after taking a walk in the Colosseum with a "third-rate" Italian, catches "Roman fever" and dies.

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

... 6) The Little French Girl, Anne Douglas Sedgwick; 7) Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis; 8) The Perennial Bachelor, Anne Parrish; 9) The Carolinian by Rafael Sabatini; 10) One Increasing Purpose, A. S. M. Hutchinson. This was the year that The Great Gatsby flopped.

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

My current reading: Billy Summers by Stephen King, about a hitman with a literary taste for Zola, especially his book Thérèse Raquin (a crime novel about adultery and murder). Billy Summers has received rave reviews in France, my interest was piqued by @josavigneau on the radio.

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

Peak insanity in our irrational culture of censoring and banning. Among books banned from libraries in a Texas school district: Anne Frank’s diary, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and... the Bible. https://t.co/qQeD6vQMde

Matthew Fraser 🇪🇺

In 1925, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was published. The book was a commercial disappointment and vanished into oblivion until it was rediscovered in the 1950s. The top-selling novel of 1925 was... Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs.