Animal Farm, a satirical allegorical novella by George Orwell about a farm, was first released in England on August 17, 1945. It depicts the tale of a band of farm animals who rise up to confront their man farmer in an effort to establish an animal-friendly society.
Animals that have been abused and overworked on a farm take over. They went out to construct a paradise of advancement, fairness, and equality with fiery idealism and passionate slogans. The setting is therefore set for one of the most incisive satiric tales ever written—a sharp-edged fairy tale for adults that charts the progression from the revolt against oppression to totalitarianism that is just as dreadful. As Animal Farm was initially published, it was thought to be directed toward Stalinist Russia. Today, it is glaringly obvious that George Orwell’s masterpiece has a meaning and a message that are still fiercely relevant wherever and whenever liberty is attacked, regardless of the cause.
A true-life political thriller about a wealthy American investor in Russia’s Wild East, the death of his upright young tax attorney, and his perilous mission to reveal the corruption in the Kremlin. The path of Bill Browder began in the South Side of Chicago and continued through Stanford Business School to the cutthroat 1990s world of hedge fund investment. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it proceeded in Moscow, where Browder made a fortune as the manager of the biggest investment fund in Russia. However, once he exposed the dishonest oligarchs plundering the businesses which he was financing, Vladimir Putin turned against him and ordered his expulsion from Russia in 2005.
Browder’s offices in Moscow were searched by law authorities in 2007, and $230 million in taxes that his fund’s firms had paid to the Russian government were taken. Sergei Magnitsky, the attorney for Browder, looked into the incident and found a vast criminal business. Sergei was detained and tortured for a year in pre-trial detention after testifying against the involved officials for a month. On November 16, 2009, eight guards wearing full riot gear beat him to death in an isolation chamber after handcuffing him to a bed rail.
When Browder caught sight of the core of evil, it completely changed his life. He started a relentless search for justice in Sergei’s honor and exposed the massive cover-up that goes all the way to Putin.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you.”
“The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.”
“Russian stories never have happy endings.”
“If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.”
“For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.”
French novelist Albert Camus wrote a novella in 1942 titled The Stranger, which was also released in English as The Outsider. Although Camus expressly disliked the term “existentialism,” its theme and attitude are sometimes regarded as instances of his philosophy, absurdism combined with existentialism.
Camus investigated what he called “the nudeness of man confronted with the ludicrous” through the tale of a regular man who unknowingly becomes involved in a senseless killing on a beach in Algeria. Published for the first time in English in 1946; a new translation by Matthew Ward.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
It Can’t Happen Here is a warning on the frailty of democracy and a terrifying, unsettlingly ageless look at how fascism could take root in America. It is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later books to match the force of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. It juxtaposes scathing political satire with the terrifyingly realistic ascension of a President who becomes a tyrant to “rescue the nation” since it was written during the Great Depression when America was mainly unaware of Hitler’s aggression. It Can’t Happen Here, which is at last back in print, continues to be a particularly significant work of fiction and is as current and fresh as the news today.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
“He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”
“It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.”
“So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.”
“NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.”
Niccol Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat, and political theorist, wrote The Prince in the 16th century as a manual for aspiring princes and kings. Machiavelli emphasises the value of allying with the helpless and putting a stop to anyone who might grow strong enough to revolt when ruling a mixed principality. A prince would need to be extremely foresighted to pull this out. Before they become too obvious, he must spot issues and evils, and he must act quickly to eliminate them.
Lords, strong men, and assistants all require close supervision. As stated earlier, everyone who has the strength or ambition to start a rebellion must be put down. A prince will have been chosen to lead a new principality either by good fortune, bad fortune, or both. It is forceful to assume authority by virtue. A prince needs to establish himself as a leader as soon as possible.
When a prince gains power through luck or through the efforts of others, he is in a risky situation because people can start to doubt his authority. He must therefore act swiftly to engender love and fear in the populace. Machiavelli does not denounce using evil to gain control. Instead, he advises carrying out immoral deeds swiftly and all at once. A prince must also devise strategies for permanently enslaving the populace.
According to Machiavelli, a principality’s military power is a good indicator of its might. A principality must always be armed to the teeth and capable of defending itself. A mercenary’s primary motivation is money, hence they shouldn’t be trusted.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”
“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”
The author of Space Invaders has written an intriguing, incantatory book about the legacy of historical crimes. In the midst of the Pinochet dictatorship, it is 1984 in Chile. A reporter who works for a dissident magazine encounters a member of the secret police and captures his statement. The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández has a compelling and horrifying narrator who first sees this man’s face on the cover of a magazine with the words “I Tortured People” when she is a young girl. The narrator’s involvement in the darkest crimes of the regime and his dedication to speaking about them follow her into adulthood and throughout her career as a writer and documentary filmmaker.
Like a secret service agent from the future, Fernández uses extraordinary feats of imagination to follow the “man who tortured people” into dark corners of history where Yuri Gagarin, chess games, morning routines, and the eponymous TV program from the title of the book coexist with the brutal yet routine schemes of the regime.
How do crimes that are obvious disappear? How does one fight against an oppressive system? Who decides how the realities we adhere to and take for granted are to be shaped? The Twilight Zone draws us into the shadowy portals of the past and serves as a constant reminder that, in the face of historical erasure, the writer’s task is to conceive deeply enough to make these gaps temporarily magnificently lit.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Empathy and compassion are traits of lucidity, the possibility of putting oneself in another’s shoes, of transmuting the skin and masking oneself with a foreign face is an exercise in pure intelligence.”
“It was lost as memories are lost in memory.”
“Being stupid is a personal choice and you don’t necessarily have to wear a uniform to exercise that evil talent.”
“It doesn’t matter what you see, it matters what you think you see.”
“Or better, a piece of outer space in which they shipwrecked lost, like astronauts without connection, all these faces that were swallowed by an unknown dimension.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a unique masterpiece that ranks among the 20th century’s most influential books; as its dystopian purgatory becomes more real, it gets more menacing. The dystopian social science fiction book Nineteen Eighty-Four by English author George Orwell serves as a warning. It was Orwell’s ninth and last book that he finished during his lifetime, and Secker & Warburg released it on June 8, 1949.
The 1949 publication of the book features political satirist George Orwell’s terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s quest for identity. The novel’s genius lies in Orwell’s prescience of contemporary life—the pervasiveness of television, the linguistic distortion—and his capacity to provide such an in-depth depiction of hell. It has been compulsory reading for students from the moment it was published and is one of the scariest books ever.
American author Ernest Hemingway created the novella The Old Man and the Sea in Cayo Blanco in 1951. It was later published in 1952. It was Hemingway’s final significant piece of published fiction during his lifetime. This brief book, which is already a modern classic, tells the heartbreaking tale of a Cuban fisherman who perishes while pursuing a massive marlin in the Gulf Stream; it is expressly mentioned in the citation that accompanied the author’s 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is”
“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
The controversial masterwork Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. has sparked more discussion than most books. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.
Last Exit to Brooklyn portrays the experiences of New Yorkers. They constantly deal with the darkest excesses of human nature and have been characterized by various reviewers as hellish and obscene. But even in these tumultuous lives, there are exquisitely lovely moments. These fascinating characters include Harry, the strike leader who hides his actual wants behind a sexist macho, Tralala, the cunning prostitute who explores the depths of sexual depravity, and Georgette, the transsexual who falls in love with a heartless hoodlum.
British courts outlawed Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1967, but that ruling was overturned the following year with the assistance of several authors and critics, including Anthony Burgess and Frank Kermode. It was the focus of an obscenity trial in the UK in 1966. The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, The Willow Tree, and Waiting Period are some of his other books. Requiem for a Dream was turned into a movie in 2000 by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked. She saw hate in the icicles that hung from her window; she saw it in the dirty slush on the streets; she heard it in the hail that scratched her window and bit her face; she could see it in the lowered heads hurrying to warm homes …”
“The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn’t be seen from a few feet away.”
“high spirits and overflowing joy making the absence of love known.”
“But it was a bike and it moved. I think that sonofabitch woulda used it even if he had ta push it or pedal it like a kiddy car. So he kicks it over after 5 minutes and we listen to it cough and miss and Spook went puttin off with a shiteatin grin on his face and we went back up stairs and a few minutes later he comes back. Smilin all over the goddamn place and the strap of his hat under his chin. I tellya man, it was a pissa.”
“I read so many different writers at the same time I did not have to work off any influences. Also, never having gone to school I didnt have to unlearn all the lies a person can learn in school about how you should write. I was unaware of the ‘rules of writing’ as proclaimed by individuals who had never written an original line in their lives. Fortunately, I had no recourse but to find my own way.”
In Brooklyn, New York, Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928–2004) was born. He left school at the age of fifteen and joined the merchant marines. His lung condition was discovered while he was at sea. Since he had no other means of support, he decided to try his hand at writing: “I knew the alphabet. I might be able to write. His debut work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was published in 1964, has since gained cult status.
The heartwarming love tale of a woman who has lost her sight and her husband, who fights for their existence as they travel through Syria as refugees to Europe. Beekeeper Nuri and artist Afra are married. In the lovely Syrian city of Aleppo, they have a straightforward existence full of family and friends—until the unthinkable occurs. They are compelled to flee after the war destroys all they care about. However, Afra’s experience was so horrific that it caused her to lose her vision. As a result, they must go across Turkey and Greece at great risk in order to reach an unknown future in Britain.
Nuri is kept going on the journey by the knowledge that Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has established an apiary and is instructing other refugees in Yorkshire in beekeeping, will be waiting for them. In addition to the sorrow of their own unfathomable loss, Nuri and Afra must face perils that would weaken even the most courageous individuals as they journey through a ruined world. They must travel in order to reconnect, above all. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a moving, potent, sympathetic, and exquisitely written example of how the human spirit may prevail. It is the kind of book that serves as a reminder of the importance of narrative.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”
“But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
“Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.”
“When you belong to someone and they are gone, who are you?”
“It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.”
Yann Martel wrote the fantasy adventure book Life of Pi, which was released in 2001. Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, the main character and a Tamil child from Pondicherry, begins to investigate moral and practical questions at a young age. After being stuck on a ship in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days following a shipwreck, he makes it alive alongside Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
“When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”
“You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”
“I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.”
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established her as one of the most outstanding writers of her generation. Her stories are one of just a few debut works – and only a few collections – to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical acclaim for its grace, insight, and compassion in depicting lives transplanted from India to America were among the many other awards and distinctions it garnered.
Lahiri expands on the issues that made her compilation an international phenomenon, including the immigrant experience, cultural clashes, assimilation struggles, and, most poignantly, the braided relationships between generations. Lahiri’s fine touch for the exact detail — the fleeting instant, the turn of phrase — opens up huge worlds of feeling on display once more.
Lahiri portrays Gogol with amazing empathy as he struggles along the first-generation path, which is littered with conflicted loyalties, humorous detours, and wrenching love affairs. She illustrates, with razor-sharp clarity, not just the defining impact of the names and expectations put upon us by our parents, but also the process by which we gradually, and sometimes painfully, begin to define ourselves.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”
“She has the gift of accepting her life.”
As a result, You ask for a story, therefore I’ll give it to you. 1952 in Afghanistan. In the little village of Shadbagh, Abdullah and his sister Pari reside with their father and stepmother. Together they endure hardship and harsh winters as their father, Saboor, is always looking for a job. Pari, who is as lovely and kind-hearted as the fairy after whom she was named, means the world to Abdullah. Abdullah is more like a dad to her than a brother and will do anything for her, even giving up his one and only pair of shoes for a priceless feather. Each night, they share a cot, their heads touching and their limbs intertwined. The siblings and their father travel to Kabul by way of the desert one day.
The events that will take place there will destroy Pari and Abdullah’s lives; sometimes a finger must be amputated in order to save a hand. Pari and Abdullah have no idea what doom awaits them there. Khaled Hosseini writes about the ties that describe us and shape our lives, the ways in which we assist our loved ones in need, how the decisions we make resonate through history, and how we are frequently surprised by the people closest to us, spanning generations and continents and moving from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
With its winning combination of heartfelt romance and bittersweet wit, this story of family life in Mexico at the turn of the century has become a best-selling phenomenon. It is earthy, enchanting, and completely charming. Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, moving story with magical moments, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit, and recipes. It was the number one book in Mexico and America for over two years before becoming a hit worldwide.
It recounts the peculiar history of the all-female De La Garza family and is a lavish feast of a book. Mexican tradition forbids Tita, the youngest daughter of the family, from getting married and forces her to care for her mother until she passes away. However, Tita develops feelings for Pedro, who is drawn to her by the entrancing meals she prepares. Pedro desperately marries Rosaura, her sister, to keep close to her, forcing Tita and Pedro to circle one other in unrequited desire. Only a bizarre series of misfortunes, misfortune, and fate manage to bring them back together despite all odds.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“You don’t have to think about love; you either feel it or you don’t.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“Necesito una respuesta en este momento, el amor no se piensa, se siente o no se siente.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“La mera verdad es que la verdad no existe, todo depende del punto de vista.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate