Tag: 1930s

“Beautiful Books, Terrible Times”

Hyperallergic has a piece on Soviet children’s books between 1920 and 1935, with images from Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920-35: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times. “The 1920s in Russia weren’t exactly what people had hoped they would be. After the 1917 Russian Revolution brought down the old regime […]

NY Mag on Shirley Jackson

New York Magazine has a piece on novelist and essayist Shirley Jackson life as author, mother and homemaker: “In June 1948, Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” — a dark fable about a ritual stoning conducted in an apparently ordinary village — roiled the readers of The New Yorker, generating more mail than […]

On the Trail of the Catwoman

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot read twice the same book.” ~ Sorta Heraclitus. I think a lot about what it means for art to be good or bad. I think one of the signs of good art is that you always find something more […]

Over the Moon, Comrade

In 1934, following the death of Lenin, one of the new rulers of the Soviet Union identified a “conspiracy” in the upper echelons of Soviet government and began a series of murderous purges that left hundreds of officials, labor leaders, intellectuals, artists, and most importantly his personal enemies […]