This week in the Great Books List

Les Fleurs Du Mal , Charles Baudelaire. 1857

Of all the poets to appear on the Great Books List, few evoke the cliché of a tortured poet better than Frenchman Charles Baudelaire. Impoverished, pallid and unrecognized Baudelaire had a short hard life but his poetry made him one of the most influential European poets of the nineteenth century.    Read more here.

Book of the week

The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

Canada has a long history of satire. Canada has produced more than its fair share of satirists and comedians although most have to travel to the US to find an audience. Ditto comedy and satire writers. A few years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, canceled  Snakes and Ladders, a political comedy set on Parliament Hill that had found an audience (which usually means CBC will cancel it immediately in favour of a multicultural sitcom set in suburban Toronto). But first-time novelist Terry Fallis knew there was an audience for Canadian political satire and decided to write The Best Laid Plans. But after failing to find a publisher he self-published it through iUniverse.
Fallis then submitted his own book to the judges of the prestigious Canadian literary award the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And this week, The Best Laid Plans won the $10,000 prize, beating out such A-list authors as Will Ferguson and Douglas Coupland. Read the review here.

Articles of note

On the 35th Anniversary of Fear of Flying

A graduate of Barnard, and an A.B.D. in 18th-century English literature from Columbia, Erica Jong began her literary career as a poet, but it was Fear of Flying that made her famous, and that novel, as the critic Lisa Marie Hogeland has said in Feminism and Its Fictions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), "more than any other novel of the decade, made its mark as a novel about sexuality," especially female sexuality. Yet at the same time that Fear of Flying spoke to women's larger concerns about coming of age in a new era, it also spoke to men. Read more here.