The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Description

The Glass Hotel is a 2020 novel by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel, and the first since winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015. It follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incidents: the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.

Vincent is a bartender at the hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. 

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

About the Author

Emily St. John Mandel is an author, born (1979) and raised on Denman Island off the west coast of British Columbia. She attained popularity with her fourth novel Station Eleven which was nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. Her novel The Glass Hotel was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2020. Her other works are-- Last Night in Montreal (2009), The Singer's Gun (2010), The Lola Quartet (2014).

She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Emily St. John Mandel (Author)

 with the original cover of the novel

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Rating: 3.8/5

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Harper Collins

Publishing Date: 24 March 2020

Edition Language: English

Genre: Ghost Mystery, Traditional Detective Mysteries, Psychological Fiction

ISBN: 9781443455725 (original hardback)

ISBN-10: 0525521143

ISBN-13: 978-0525521143

Pages: 320

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott. Fitzgerald

Description

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. It is the era when Jazz music and sex were overtaking everything in America-- it was called the Jazz Age and Prohibition-era of America. Apart from Jazz music, that period was known for economic prosperity, flapper culture, libertine mores, rebellious youth, and ubiquitous speakeasies which are utterly conveyed in Fitgerald's fictional narrative. The story explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess-- creating a portrait of the 'Roaring Twenties' that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.      

The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby who lives in a luxurious mansion on the affluent Long Island shore. His lavish and glitterati parties had become the talk of the town. Amid the throng of guests, starlets, and champagne waiters, yet their host appeared oddly aloof. These parties were to impress only one person - his extremely idealistic passion, his ex-lover, the beautiful former debutante -- Daisy Buchanan, with whom he had a brief affair before the war and her marriage to Tom. Gatsby had an unrealistic obsession with her and he was trying hard to reunite with her. Tom keeps a mistress who gets killed accidentally. The incident had been portrayed wrongly by Tom which brings unwanted results.

The Great Gatsby is generally considered to be the finest novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many literary critics consider 'The Great Gatsby' to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus. Written in easy prose without complex literary experiment, at the height of the author's maturity, it is now an undisputed classic of American literature and is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The novel brilliantly brings out the shallowness of humanity, the eerie silence as the syncopated rhythm of the Jazz fades. It brilliantly captures both the disillusion of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status.

Adaptation

The Great Gatsby had been adapted in many forms of media. 

Ballet performances premiered on different platforms and theatres. The latest was performed in 2013 at Leed Grand Theatre in the UK.

Computer Games such as Classic adventures: The Great Gatsby (2010), The Great Gatsby for NSE (2011), The Great Gatsby: The Video Game (2013) are few popular games.

Films have been played a big part in making The Great Gatsby so popular. It has been adapted to films several times with the same title 'The Great Gatsby' in the year of 1926, 1949,1974, and 2013.

In literature, the novel The Double Bind (2007) has a character, who is elderly and homeless, introduced as Daisy's son. 

And, the novel Great is a modern-day young adult fiction retelling of The Great Gatsby with a female Gatsby named Jacinta Trimalchio.

Opera New York Metropolitan opera commissioned John Habbison to compose an operatic treatment of the novel to commemorate the 25th anniversary of James Levine's debut. The work called The Great Gatsby premiered on December 20, 1999.  

Radio 

• On January 1, 1950, an hour-long adaptation was broadcast on CBS's Family Hour of Stars starring Kirk Douglas as Gatsby.
• In October 2008, the BBC World Service commissioned an abridged 10-part reading of the story, read from the view of Nick Carraway by Trevor White.
• In May 2012, BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Great Gatsby, a Classic Serial dramatization by Robert Forrest.

Television

The Great Gatsby has been adapted several times as films and as episodes for various dramatic series such as :

• The Great Gatsby (1955)--an NBC episode for Robert Montgomery Presents
• The Great Gatsby (1958)--a CBS episode for Playhouse 90 
• The Great Gatsby (2000)--an A&E movie

Theater

• The 1926 stage adaptation of Owen Davis, subsequently developed, became the 1926 film version.
• In July 2006, Simon Levy's stage adaptation, the only one authorized and granted exclusive rights by Fitzgerald Estate, premiered at The Guthrie Theater to commemorate the opening of its new theatre. It was subsequently produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre. In 2012, a revised version was produced at Arizona Theatre Company and Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, Canada.
• In 2010, Gatz, an Off-Broadway production by Elevator Repair Service, debuted and was highly praised by critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel This Side of Paradise in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade, the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald's masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald's fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Rating: 4.2/5

Author: Scott Fitzgerald

Publisher: Scribner

Publishing Date: September 30, 2004

Edition Language: English Language

Genre: Romance, Classic Fiction

ISBN-10: 9780743273565

ISBN-13: 978-0743273565

Pages: 208 (Paperback)

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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

cover page 

Description

The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood's classic, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which is the prequel to The Testament. 

More than fifteen years after the event of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs of rotting from the within and going towards vanishing. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. 

The Testament is narrated by Aunt Lydia - A character from the previous novel; Agnes - A young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy - A young woman living in Canada. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways. With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost working of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

The Testaments was a joint winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, alongside Bernardine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, other. It was also voted Best Fiction novel in the Goodreads Choice Awards, 2019.

  

Margaret Atwood wrote The Testament in coordination with the ongoing television series of The Handmaid's Tale. The novel was released simultaneously as a book (novel) and as an audiobook. In a separate adaption, BBC Radio 4 serialized the novel in 15 quarter-hour episodes.

About the Author

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, 9 collections of short fiction, 8 children's books, and 2 graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and power politics. Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales.

Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clark Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, the National Book Critics, and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure. She is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writer's Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. 

She is also the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.

Margaret Atwood

Link to the review of prequel of The Testaments:- 

The Handmaid's Tale

https://bookreviewsbyarti.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-handmaids-tale.html

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Rating: 4.6/5

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Nann A. Talese (First Edition)

Publishing Date: September 10, 2019 (First Edition)

Edition Language: English

Genre: Literary Criticism & Theory, Dystopian Fiction, Literary Fiction

ISBN-10: 0385543786

ISBN-13: 978-0385543781

Pages: 432

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