Previously Read Books
March 2026
James by Percival Everett.
When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan.
Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before.
James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
February 2026
The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway was hailed by The New York Times as "a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic prose that puts more literary English to shame".
With this bold debut novel, Hemingway established his reputation as the chronicler of the "lost generation" of American expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s. At the heart of the action are the narrator Jake Barnes, whose tough front belies a profound vulnerability, and Lady Brett Ashley, who embodies the sexually liberated new woman of the period.
In pursuit of an impossible relationship with her, Jake seeks solace in male camaraderie and in the restorative power of nature. From the cosmopolitan French capital, imbued with the transgressive spirit of the jazz age, the narrative takes us to the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona in rural Spain, idealised as yet uncorrupted by modernity. There, in the young bullfighter Pedro Romero, Hemingway creates an iconic representation of the authenticity and sense of purpose that elude Jake and his companions, so riddled with contradictions and self-destructive in their reckless hedonism.
About and of its time, The Sun Also Rises speaks to today's readers in the yearning for connection and the psychological complexity of its protagonists, adrift in a world where the collapse of traditional values is a source of exhilaration and of anxiety.