“The Joke” ~ Milan Kundera

“The Joke” ~ Milan Kundera

Publisher: Harper Perennial; Publication Date: 1993-04-14

Download Link

All too often, this novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after, “The Joke” was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favour of valuing the book (and all Kundera’s work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of “human existence”.

The present edition presents English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of “The Joke”. For reasons he describes in his Author’s Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel’s narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

J.M. Coetzee ~ “Age of Iron”

J.M. Coetzee ~ “Age of Iron”

Download Link

~ Harsh, unflinching and powerful, Coetzee’s new novel is a cry of moral outrage at the legacy that apartheid has created in South Africa. In scenes of stunning ferocity, he depicts the unequal warfare waging between the two races, a conflict in which the balance of power is slowly shifting. An elderly woman's letters to her daughter in America make up the narrative. Near death from rapidly advancing cancer, Cape Town resident Mrs. Curren is a retired university professor and political liberal who has always considered herself a “good person” in deploring the government’s brutal policies, though she has been insulated from the barbarism they produce. When the teenage son of her housekeeper is murdered by the police and his activist friend is also shot by security forces, Mrs. Curren realizes that “now my eyes are open and I can never close them again.” The only person to whom she can communicate her anguished feelings of futility and waste is an alcoholic derelict whom she prevails on to be her messenger after her death, by mailing the packet of her letters to her daughter. In them she records the rising tide of militancy among young blacks; brave, defiant and vengeful, they are a generation whose hearts have turned to iron. His metaphors in service to a story that moves with the implacability of a nightmare, Coetzee’s own urgent message has never been so cogently delivered. ~

J.M. Coetzee ~ “Disgrace”

J.M. Coetzee ~ “Disgrace”

Download Link

~ David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else’s. At 52, the protagonist of “Disgrace” is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: “Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.” His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in “Disgrace” he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired - a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron’s last years. Not empty, unread criticism, “prose measured by the yard,” but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter’s farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. “Nothing,” David thinks, “could be more simple.” But nothing, in fact, is more complicated - or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farm-worker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David’s disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee’s painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view “Disgrace” as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country’s history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee’s recent Princeton lectures, “The Lives of Animals”, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, “Where is home, and how do I get there?” David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader, “a flash of revelation and a flash of response” - or not at all. Coetzee’s book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. ~

“Modern Arabic Literature” ~ (The History of Arabic Literature)

“Modern Arabic Literature” ~ (The History of Arabic Literature)

~ By M.M. Badawi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Publication Date: 1993-01-29

Download Link

This volume of the “History of Arabic Literature” presents the first authoritative, comprehensive, critical survey of creative writing in Arabic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. The rise of secular education, printing and journalism created a new reading public, and Western ideas and literary forms, notably the novel, the short story, and drama, became influential. This book examines the attempts made by Arab men and women to adapt the imported forms as well as the indigenous literary tradition to meet the requirements of the modern world. Quoted material is given in English translation and there is an extensive bibliography.

“E. E. Cummings” (Bloom’s Major Poets)

“E. E. Cummings” (Bloom’s Major Poets)

By Harold Bloom

Publisher: Chelsea House Publications; Publication Date: 2003-05

Download Link

The myth of E.E. Cummings stressed isolation, the difficulty of love, and the realities of death. This volume includes extracts from critical essays that examine important themes in Cummings’ poetry. Studied works include “All in Green Went My Love Riding,” “Memorabilia,” “I Sing of Olaf, Glad and Gig,” “Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond,” and "My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love." This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg, Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works.

Italo Calvino ~ “Cosmicomics”

Italo Calvino ~ “Cosmicomics”

Download Link

An enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Calvino makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

Metaphysical conceits are a thing of the past. Now with moon shots and interstellar probes, a writer really in tune with his age has to think of scientific conceits, or better yet, treat mathematical formulate, or theories and equations from physics, as if they were “characters” gamboling about the universe, beaming and burping through the void, carrying on the most enlightened (though not necessarily enlightening) conversations: “ ‘Ahal’ I said. ‘Why don't we play at flying galaxies?’ ‘Galaxies?’ Pfwfp suddenly brightened with pleasure. ‘Suits me. But you…. you don’t have galaxy’ 'Yes, I do'…” Italo Calvino offers many similar exchanges, his tales being extraordinary and brilliant (if you like them; tiresome and thin, if you don’t) variations on the whole spectrum of evolutionary transformations, contractions, and expansions that have affected time and space since whatever your version of genesis happens to be. Calvino is a witty and fanciful fellow who enjoys linguistic pirouettes somewhat in the manner of Nabokov, but he lacks the latter’s commanding personality, and he relies too heavily on the pathetic fallacy (the illusion that external objects have human feelings), so we find his simple cellular creatures telling us “When I was a kid, the only playthings we had in the whole universe were the hydrogen atoms…” etc. For science fiction devotees, in any case, clearly the most sophisticated item yet from that genre.

“2666” ~ Roberto Bolano

“2666” ~ Roberto Bolano

Download Link

It was one thing to read Roberto Bolano’s novel “The Savage Detectives” and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolano’s true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: “2666”, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolano’s mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of “The Savage Detectives” is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, “2666”, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there – he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders – but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy’ Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane.

“Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution” ~ By Peter Swirski

“Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution” ~ By Peter Swirski

Publisher: University of Texas; Publication Date: 2010-04-01

Download Link

In a new approach to inter-disciplinary literary theory, “Literature, Analytically Speaking” integrates literary studies with analytic aesthetics, girded by neo-Darwinian evolution. Scrutinizing narrative fiction through a lens of analytic philosophy, revered literary theorist Peter Swirski puts new life into literary theory while fashioning a set of practical guidelines for critics in the interpretive trenches.

Dismissing critical inquirers who deny intention its key role in the study of literary reception, Swirski extends the defense of intentionality to art and to human behaviour in general. In the process, Swirski takes stock of the recent work in evolutionary theory, arguing that the analysis of narrative truth may be grounded in the neo-Darwinian paradigm which forms the empirical backbone behind his analytic approach. “Literature, Analytically Speaking” presents a series of precepts designed to capture the ways in which we do interpret (and ought to interpret) works of literature. Reflecting a resounding shift from the post-structuralist paradigm, Swirski's lively and colorful presentation, backed up by a dazzling variety of examples and case studies, re-conceptualizes the aesthetics of literature and literary studies.

“Arabic Poetry - Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition” ~ Muhsin J. al-Musawi

“Arabic Poetry - Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition” ~ Muhsin J. al-Musawi

Routledge / 2006 / 328 pp

Download Link

~ Buy this book if you are interested in: tracking Arab’s ‘dated’ history - 1914-2006; exploring the ‘un-datable’ in Middle Eastern Literary heritage - pre-570 up till today; appreciating the intersection of modernity with tradition or the ‘trajectories’ which, for example, the interface between T.S Eliot and al-Bayati has occasioned in modern Arab poetics. Don’t buy this book if you are not prepared to be tossed like a pendulum between the Eastern literary tradition and the huge repertoire of the Western critical patrimony. This book, which cites not less than 350 sources, covers over 300 pages and took its author not less than ten years to produce, is a sine qua non for teachers of Arabic literary criticism; it is a veritable companion for students of Arabic poetical heritage. In other words, unto those interested in how far off or on the track has Arabic poetry/poetics gone since the advent of modernity, I recommend this book. ~

~ Oladosu Afis

R. Victoria Arana, "The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry, 1900 to the Present"

R. Victoria Arana, "The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry, 1900 to the Present"

Facts on File | 2007-11-30 | 544 pages |

Download Link

“The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry, 1900 to the Present” is a comprehensive introduction to 20th and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems. Containing approximately 500 entries that span the globe and cover the most prominent writers from each continent and many of the world’s islands, this indispensable guide is the perfect companion to poetry courses. Appendixes include a general bibliography, a list of poets by geographic region, and a list of Nobel Prize Winners. Coverage includes: Poets, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Anna Akhmatova, Rabindranath Tagore, Federico Garcia Lorca, Bei Dao, and many more; major poems, such as “The Poems of Dr. Zhivago”, “Sonnets to Orpheus”, and “Ode To Walt Whitman”; and important concepts and movements, such as field poetics and French rap.

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

Oxford | 704 Pages | 1996 |

Download Link

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian rug usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in language and locale. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, lead by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred. In “The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories”, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-four tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes virtually all the great crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair-detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest - not to say love - of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a goldmine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to embrace every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

Mary Ellen Snodgrass, "Encyclopedia Of Gothic Literature"

Mary Ellen Snodgrass, "Encyclopedia Of Gothic Literature"

Facts on File | 2004-11 | 480 pages |

Download Link

From the origins of the movement in the 18th century to contemporary writers such as Stephen King, this A-to-Z guide to Gothic literature covers a vast array of works and writers from Britain and America, as well as a variety of genres - novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and even a few influential films and works of art. The extensive “Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature” thoroughly examines this increasingly popular topic.

Mary Ellen Snodgrass, “Encyclopedia Of Feminist Literature (Literary Movements)”

Mary Ellen Snodgrass, “Encyclopedia Of Feminist Literature (Literary Movements)”

Facts on File | 2006 | 785 pp |

Download Link

An accessible one-volume encyclopedia, this addition to the Literary Movements series is a comprehensive reference guide to the history and development of feminist literature, from early fairy tales to works by great women writers of today. Hundreds of informative A-to-Z entries cover a wide range of works and writers from around the world, as well as a range of genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and criticism. Focusing on the feminist works and writers that most often appear in high school and college curricula, "Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature" is the definitive resource for this movement. Its coverage includes writers such as Willa Cather, George Eliot, Helen Keller, Anais Nin, and Gloria Steinem; works such as "The Bell Jar", "The Feminist Mystique", "Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman", and "The Woman Warrior", characters such as Cinderella, Hester Prynne, and the Wife of Bath; and much more.

Vladimir Nabokov ~ “The Defence”

Vladimir Nabokov ~ “The Defence”

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons | 1964 | 160 pages

Download Link

”The Defence” is one of the major novels by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel describes a chess-genius Luzhin, who discovers his talents in boyhood, rising into the rank of Grandmaster. The Russian title of this novel is “Zashchita Luzhina” which means “The Luzhin Defence”. It was originally written and published in Russian in 1930 and translated to English by Michael Scammell in 1964 at collaboration with the author. Nabokov himself said about this novel: “Of all my Russian books, “The Defence” contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth” - which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be.” Later he described this novel as the “story of a human who was crushed by his genius”.

Albert Camus ~ “The Plague”

Albert Camus ~ “The Plague”

Download Link

The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, “The Plague” is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it.

The Plague is easily one of the best ten novels ever written, far surpassing even the erstwhile classic “The Stranger”. Whereas we examine an uncommonly cold-hearted man in a normal world in the pages of The Stranger, in this novel it is a harsh outside world which closes in on a group of fascinating characters. It is in this much more developed context that Camus’ most remarkable notions of humanity, life, and existence can be fleshed out and communicated more effectively. The lessons of good, normal lives in a world gone mad are much more instructive and meaningful than the observations in “The Stranger” of a man gone mad in a normal world.

A word to the wise: when large numbers of rats come out of the woodwork and commence dying nasty, bloody deaths in the streets and houses, something is definitely wrong. In the port city of Oran, the population ignores the signs of danger and only grudgingly admits that an epidemic, a form of the bubonic plague to be exact, has taken root in their city. The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, is a doctor who finally helps convince the authorities to take extreme measures in the interest of public safety and to eventually quarantine the entire town. Over the course of the novel, we get to observe the manner in which Dr. Rieux, his companions, and prominent men of the community react to the worsening plague and its social consequences. Dr. Rieux has just sent his unhealthy wife off to a sanitarium before the plague breaks out, and he must suffer her absence alongside the stresses of working 20+ hours a day trying to save people’s lives while accomplishing little more than watching them die horrible deaths. Dr. Rieux's attempts to make sense of everything is a basic pulse of the story; an atheist, he cannot find happiness but goes on day after day fighting the disease with all his might because that is what he as a doctor is supposed to do. His friend Tarrou supplies much of the knowledge we glean about the reactions of society as a whole as month after month of isolation continues in the face of death’s greedy fingers. His journal records small but important facts about all manner of men, yet he himself cannot be said to find ultimate peace. We first encounter M. Cottard after he has hanged himself and been saved before death. A criminal type yet not a bad man, his initial worries over inquiries into his suicide attempt fade away as the plague’s grip on Oran tightens. He emerges from a self-imposed exile to actually become a communicating member of society; he alone seems to enjoy the plague because it makes everyone else like him, forced to live each day with the fear of a brooding, horrible fate. Then there is M. Grande, one of the favorite characters in all of literature. A simple civil service employee, he devotes himself to volunteer work computing plague statistics and the like while still continuing his fervent efforts at writing a novel. Grande’s wife left him years earlier because he got too wrapped up in his work and lost the words to communicate his love for her; he began writing a novel in an attempt to find those words. With great devotion and commitment he works on his writing, determined to produce a perfectly crafted novel, one where each word is meaningful and necessary for the story - in short, one that will inspire the future publisher to introduce it to his publishing house cohorts with the phrase, “Hats off, gentlemen.” After untold months of dedicated effort, Grande has yet to get the first sentence to sound exactly right; he engages all of his efforts into perfecting this one sentence, sure that the rest of the novel will fall into place after it is perfected.

These main characters are all fascinating character studies. Not all of them live to see the plague’s end, but each of them struggles to find meaning in his own experience - e.g., one character continues living because that is what is required of human beings, to go on fighting for life in a meaningless world; another character seeks to become a saint of sorts by helping his fellow man fight the pestilence. The overriding message that is left with at the end is that life is worth living despite the arbitrary cruelties of an unforgiving world because there is more good in man than there is evil. The book delivered in fact a rather darkly uplifting celebration of the human spirit; one’s loved ones give life its meaning in a hostile world. “The Plague” succeeds in ways “The Stranger” never could because the characters in this novel are utterly human and represent diverse aspects of the lives of each of us.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

Download Link

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”

All across America, readers are talking about Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, set in Sweden and featuring Lisbeth Salander — “one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller”. The "trilogy" is an international sensation that will grab you and keep you “reading with eyes wide open”. It is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed, written with a breakneck pace and verve, but “be warned: the trilogy is seriously addictive.”

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

(1) Once you start “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, there’s no turning back. This debut thriller - the first in a "trilogy" from the late Stieg Larsson - is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch - and there’s always a catch - is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson’s novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don’t want to mess with “the girl with the dragon tattoo”.

(2) Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family’s remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden’s dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a "trilogy" introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption — at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy.

“THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE”

Download Link

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”

All across America, readers are talking about Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, set in Sweden and featuring Lisbeth Salander — “one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller”. The "trilogy" is an international sensation that will grab you and keep you “reading with eyes wide open”. It is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed, written with a breakneck pace and verve, but “be warned: the trilogy is seriously addictive.”

“The Girl Who Played with Fire”

(1) In “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE”, the second volume in the late Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”, publisher Mikael Blomkvist and the police are conducting parallel investigations into three horrifying murders - and their initial evidence points straight at young computer genius and social misfit Lisbeth Salander. Kalle Bastard Blomkvist (as Salander has begun referring to him) hasn’t seen Salander in nearly two years, except for one night when he happened to witness a huge man attempting to kidnap her and both she and the attacker eluded him. He’s bewildered about why she cut him off cold, but had accepted her decision - until now. He doesn’t believe Salander killed these victims. Well, at least not two of them. He has to contact her, find out how she's become embroiled in this, and help her. Salander, as usual, has her own ideas about who she will see and when….

(2) In “THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO”, Larsson partnered Blomkvist and Salander as they unraveled a twisted tale of corporate greed, Fascist connections, and perverse sex and violence. “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE” highlights another subject on which Larsson wanted to shine light, namely the underbelly of the sex trade, a swill of human misery being forcibly imposed for money and simple loathing of women. Blomkvist’s magazine, “Millennium”, plans an issue devoted to the subject based on the interviews and reporting of a criminologist and a journalist, and there follows much in-house discussion of the lurid material and how it should be presented to the public. But the three murders turn the magazine and its people on their heads.

Meanwhile, Salander travels, changes her appearance, and matures in the early chapters of the 569-page book that covers four months in total and is told in four parts. Among her pursuits: attempting to proof Fermat’s “Last Theorem” in a way Fermat himself might have done, furnishing her new abode, and keeping tabs on Bjurman (whom, recall, she memorably tattooed in “THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO”). Then, she disappears for quite a spell as the murder investigation gets cranking, and finally, she regains the spotlight as the book rushes headlong into a heart-stopping denouement.

The last book in this series - tentatively entitled “THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST” in its English translation - was not scheduled for release until 2010. However, the entire “TRILOGY” had already been published in Swedish (naturally), French, and German. Larsson reportedly had planned a ten-volume series. He had written part of the fourth book and had outlined volumes five, six, and seven. Sadly, due to his early death, only the “trilogy” is complete. After reading “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE”, the thought creeps in that perhaps the trilogy will not provide closure, and that the reader could be left dangling, unsatisfied. That would be a crying shame because Salander and Blomkvist - along with other continuing characters - do burrow themselves deeply into the reader’s affections. Fortunately, reviewers who have read, in the other aforementioned languages, the entire story arc, including the final novel, seem generally very satisfied. Some claim that the last book, also the longest, is a “grand finale” that answers all outstanding questions. A few are less effusive, stating that the last book can’t meet the anticipatory heights set by the stunning, unusual first one, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.

This last criticism can be applied to the second book as well. “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE” does not pack quite the punch of uniqueness that “THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO” did. One can perhaps think of the movie trilogy THE MATRIX, MATRIX RELOADED, and THE MATRIX REVOLUTION as an analogy. The smash introductory film awed with its mind-bending perspective. The second and third passes were very solid, even amazing, but they only reiterated the cutting-edge magic so novel in The MATRIX, building on it, not inventing something mind-blowingly fresh. Familiarity takes a bit of the bloom off the rose, but it certainly doesn’t breed contempt in these instances. Larsson’s “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE” lags a little during the mid-section in which criminal investigation procedure grinds along and the author belabors certain points, seeming to believe his readers novices at crime mysteries. But overall, “THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE” accelerates the enthralling story of Lisbeth and Mikael with panache. One can’t help thinking the world they inhabit is too slimy, too vicious, but Larsson was a man with many crusades and causes, and his “trilogy” vividly paints the harsh pictures of society that he hoped to reform. The “Millennium Trilogy” encompasses uncompromising social critique; prickling thrills; and curious, bittersweet romance.

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest”

Download Link

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”

All across America, readers are talking about Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, set in Sweden and featuring Lisbeth Salander — “one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller”. The "trilogy" is an international sensation that will grab you and keep you “reading with eyes wide open”. It is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed, written with a breakneck pace and verve, but “be warned: the trilogy is seriously addictive.”

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest”

As the finale to Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest” is not content to merely match the adrenaline-charged pace that made international bestsellers out of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played with Fire”. Instead, it roars with an explosive storyline that blows the doors off the series and announces that the very best has been saved for last. A familiar evil lies in wait for Lisbeth Salander, but this time, she must do more than confront the miscreants of her past; she must destroy them. Much to her chagrin, survival requires her to place a great deal of faith in journalist Mikael Blomkvist and trust his judgment when the stakes are highest. To reveal more of the plot would be criminal, as Larsson’s mastery of the unexpected is why millions have fallen hard for his work. But rest assured that the odds are again stacked, the challenges personal, and the action fraught with neck-snapping revelations in this snarling conclusion to a thrilling triad.

This closing chapter to The Girl’s pursuit of justice is guaranteed to leave readers both satisfied and saddened once the final page has been turned.