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Monday, January 1, 2018

Info Post
By Ann Lee


The Thirty-Nine Steps is one of the first books to explore the genre of the paranoid thriller. It was written by John Buchan and came out in 1915, and is the first of his government conspiracy fiction books that features the character of Richard Hannay, who appears in Buchan's other works. This ambiguously titled novel follows Hannay's unlikely adventures, full of action and heroics.

While there is a wealth of great novels about conspiracies that have to do with entire countries falling prey to an evil plot, sometimes it is more interesting and easier to understand when the plot takes place on a small scale. Dashiell Hammett's short story "Nightmare Town" takes this approach. The story is about the deadly mystery of a small town conspiring to commit insurance fraud.

The Ministry of Fear is a book that came out in 1943 and was written by Graham Greene. The backdrop of World War II and the Nazi regime made many readers very interested in this book when it was first published. It had to do with the way Nazis would blackmail individuals into cooperating with them.

Many people have heard of The Manchurian Candidate because of the film by the same title featuring Denzel Washington, but plenty of others knew about it long before that. Richard Condon wrote the novel in 1959, and the fear of communism definitely had a big influence on the writing of this book and its reception. The protagonist is subject to brainwashing to make him carry out an assassination.

John F. Kennedy's assassination was a tragedy, and an event that left a lot of people wondering who really did it. While conspirators can speculate to no end without ever having any proof of their beliefs, Richard Condon chose to express his feelings in a story called Winter Kills. This dark tale covers both what is known to have happened and goes into theories as well.

Many people have heard about The Illuminatus! Trilogy because of the huge impact it has had on society. Although the trilogy is now usually printed as one book, they were published separately with the first novel coming out in 1969, and the last one in 1971. The time when the books were coming out was a historic and revolutionary time, and the book reflected this with the various genres and subjects courageously explored.

Thomas Pynchon's novella called The Crying Lot 49 may be a relatively quick read, but it is a literary journey worth taking. Published in 1966, it is full of cultural references out of that colorful time that Pynchon is very prone to making. The plot in this story has to do with two postal services that were pitted against each other due to a conflict dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Not everyone enjoyed Thomas Pynchon's controversial and revolutionary book called Gravity's Rainbow when it first came out, and the same is true today. However, many people love it because it goes to places most writers didn't dare to go then and still don't today. All at the same time, through many complex characters and situations, it covers many difficult topics.




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