Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  A paradox runs across the latter period of Joseph Conrad’s career in which many of his characteristic themes, notably the conflicts of the heart upon the realization of the horrors and brutality tied to a livelihood. Superficially, Conrad was branching out, delving more into the politics of Eastern Europe with The Secret Agent and, its spiritual successor, Under Western Eyes . Both deal with the rise of political terrorism as Russia was rising from the failed revolution of 1905 to its history making one more than a decade later. Both novels, however, are centered on a theme central to Conrad’s work, the moral dilemma of the protagonist torn between duty and ethics. His short story collection, ‘Twixt Land and Sea , comprising stories written around these two later works, looks at the conundrums Conrad was exploring since Heart of Darkness from different angles. “The Secret Sharer”, one of his most famous short stories is, at first reading, a simple tale. The new captain of a c...

  E.M. Forster led a long adventurous life around the world. For all that his literary output is surprisingly short, though relegated largely to three masterworks of the early 20 th century, A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), along with a handful of short stories, essays and three other novels (one published posthumously). His influence, however, is far reaching. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has delved into even one of the three pillars of his literary career and, yet, perhaps because so much has been borrowed from him, Forster the writer is something of an enigma as a person. He led a cosmopolitan life throughout Europe, writing extensively about Florence, India and a vast amount of essays on Egypt. Then, in 1948 he took a trip through the Grand Canyon with a burro. But his gaze toward the places he visited was never blinded by his position as a well-endowed Englishman in a strange land. His writing speaks to a lar...