English Knowledge

📗 Old Wives’ Tale ✍️ Arnold Bennett - 1908 H.G. Wells believes "Arnold Bennett’s superb Old Wives’ Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest long novel that has been written in English and in the English fashion, in this generation." First published in 1908, The Old Wives’ Tale affirms the integrity of ordinary lives as it tells the story of the Baines sisters–shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia–over the course of nearly half a century. Bennett traces the sisters’ lives from childhood in their father’s drapery shop in provincial Bursley, England, during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women.

📗 Rabbit, Run ✍️ John Updike - 1960 Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” Updike himself said Rabbit, Run was the novel most people associate him with, even though other novels in the series won Pulitzer Prizes.