This week in the Great Books List

War Poems, Siegfried Sassoon. 1918

The horrific meat grinder of World War One ’s Western Front produced an incredible number of outstanding poets --Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Walter de la Mare, Robert McCrae, Hermann Hesse, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemmingway among others. One, Siegfried Sassoon, was not only a genuine war hero, but used his fame and poetry to attack the prosecution of the war and defined the role of poet as political dissident. Read more here.

Book of the week

The Other by David Guterson

Ben Naparstek writes in The Age that David Guterson's disturbed mother often warned him that people weren't who they appeared to be. Her paranoia about the identities of people contained a germ of truth, however. In his new novel, The Other, Guterson considers how people are shaped by their repressed alternate selves. The Pacific Northwest was the setting of his debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994),and after a couple of less successful novels, Guterson returns to his native landscape for The Other. Read the review here.

Articles of note

Exile of the Native Son

As James Campbell writes in this week's TLS, by the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir, and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Read more here.