I took a William Faulkner/Toni Morrison course back in college that has stuck with me for 20+ years–we read 5 by each author which led to some very cool and unexpected resonance and conversation. Two books that I remember fitting very well were Light in August and Song of Solomon.
I also just read American Prometheus and loved it, while my mom read the other Oppenheimer biography from Ray Monk. I was really curious about the cajones Monk had to write his biography in the massive shadow of Prometheus. It is by far the established biography, but Monk makes a strong case for his own–that he focuses on Oppie’s significant contributions to physics, which Prometheus mostly disregards, focusing instead on his diminishing returns as a manager. Prometheus is a fantastic book, but talking about the Monk made me turn a more critical eye to the ways it may have pigeon-holed Oppie too simplistically.
I’d love to hear what other pairings of either author or books y’all may have!
Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman are a great pair for fantasy novels (Dragonlance and The Death Gate Cycle.)
Cool pairing! I know Dragonlance but am not familiar with Hickman.
I feel like Chuck Palaniuk and Tom Robbins are the cursed and blessed sides of the same coin.
I like it.
Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.
Each of them are known are known for a single work that paramount to the horror genre within the same century and those books are nothing like their pop culture counterparts.
I happen to be reading both Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. Wasn’t planned - just the next two on my library TBR list. Dr Z happens at the birth of the Russian revolution, and ULoB is a result of that revolution, with Soviet Russia invading Czechoslovakia. But it’s not just that connection. I keep coming across passages that complement each other. Here’s two with the same theme of (un)inspiring speeches.
From Doctor Zhivago (Trans. Pevear)
The greatest success fell to the worst orator, who did not weary his listeners with the necessity of following him. His every word was accompanied by a roar of sympathy. No one regretted that his speech was drowned out by the noise of approval. They hastened to agree with him out of impatience, cried ‘shame’, then suddenly, bored by the monotony of his voice, they all rose to a man and, forgetting about the orator, hat after hat, row after row, thronged down the stairs and poured outside.
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being
She kept coming back to the speech Dubcek had given over the radio after his return from Moscow. Although she had completely forgotten what he said, she could still hear his quavering voice.
that’s a really cool parallel.
I know right? And they’re both absurdly fun.
was there a faulkner book that matched up with Beloved?
Ok here me out on this: Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas. Both suffered lifelong sexual abuse, were college-educated survival-sex-workers, who considered their manuscripts to be their life’s passion. If you read “The SCUM Manifesto” and “Up Your Ass!”, it’s basically the lifestyle outlines in Dworkin’s semi-autobiographical novel “Ice and Fire”. Both were driven by a fire to see their work published that was often thwarted. But whereas Solanas was self-serving in her pursuit of notoriety and more than a bit hampered by mental illness, Dworkin was fixated on helping other women.
Just thought it was interesting to see how Dworkin can live the same life of an artist and survival-sex-worker, obsessed with writing about capitalism and the patriarchy, and be such a different person. Solanas is like Dworkin through a scary fun house mirror. She is, however, a lot funnier.
Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith (particularly N.W. and White Teeth) - it feels like their characters occupy the same space, but somehow keep missing each other.
that’s a fab description
What’re some interesting things you learned in terms of pairing Faulkner & Morrison?
James Tiptree Jr. and Suzette Haden Elgin.
Both were early feminist/proto-feminists with academic backgrounds, who thought about how humans would perceive aliens.
Tiptree was a self-identified xenophile who did psych research on the desire for novel stimulation. She imagined that aliens would be so overwhelmingly NOVEL that we’d be irresistibly drawn to them. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” is the best example, but it’s present in “With Delicate Mad Hands” and “The Women Men Don’t See” as well.
Hadin Elgin was a linguist who worked with the Sapir-Word hypothesis, the idea that language impacts what we perceive. SHE thought aliens would be SO novel that we’d be unable to relate to them in any way, and would instinctively isolate as much as possible. So in her Native Tongue trilogy, people generally want to avoid aliens if they don’t have the right linguistic training.
I took a very wonderful class in college where we read Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in dialogue with each other, and it was perfect. They came out at essentially the same moment but are incredibly different in their tone, goals, and impact. They’re essentially part of two unrelated literary traditions, from two very different authors, and reading then side-by-side and looking at their overlaps and differences is a great way of exploring topics from the period.