I love a book that has reason to give me pause, and this book was exactly that. Some quotables:1. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction...it is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in the world. They can sit at t...
A youth remains eternally young by a weird coincidence, which happens after he inspires an artist to transcend himself in painting a portrait, and in a charged moment right after that portrait is finished his accidentally uttered wish comes true. A cynical hedonist with a penchant for experimenta...
As is typical of many books written in the era, most of the characters are too shallow for me. They so easily fall into the trap of one bad decision leading to another and following the path of least resistance instead of telling themselves to take another path. Dorian feels that the way to hap...
The Wild Wit Of Oscar Wilde More than a century after his death, Oscar Wilde still intrigues us. This poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist was also his era's leading aphorist. George Bernard Shaw called him "incomparably the greatest talker of his time -- perhaps of all time." The personality...
Okay, as recently, I'm mopping up some titles from "To Read Short Fiction Lists", genre and lit, and as I'm in the W's....I had 3 pieces from Wilde on the list - I've previously read a *bit* of him (about 10 stories, mostly thanks to Dedalus Books Decadence series) but, for example, haven't tackl...
When I was quite young – I guess, if you were of a mind to, you might say it was a generation ago – I was listening to a radio program and for some reason they decided to do the handbag scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. I’d heard of the play before, obviously, but only the name. I had...
For the first time in one volume, this complete collection of all the short fiction Oscar Wilde published contains such social and literary parodies as "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost;" such well-known fairy tales as "The Happy Prince," "The Young King," and "The Fisherman...
The original Wilde Thing does it again...Seriously...how does one not love on Oscar Wilde when he's throwing down the snarky...in this case, and in proper British fashion, against cocky, adolescent-cultured Americans and their starched-lip, tradition-trapped English cousins? A bounty of clever fr...
Camille de Grieux apaixona-se por René Teleny, um pianista com quem estabelece uma relação quase metafísica quando o ouve pela primeira vez num concerto de beneficência. Tenta resistir à paixão que o assola, mas não consegue, e cai nos braços do pianista, com o qual tem sessões prolongadas de sex...
Wilde's anthropomorphizing parables are beautifully written, emotionally moving and exquisitely poignant; praising the laudable virtues of the Catholic Church and warning of the shameful outcomes of the seven deadly sins. Themes of friendship and charity feature heavily with Christian overtones, ...
"Prism, where is that baby?" demands the damndest dowager in theatre history in OWs farcical masterpiece. Feeling blue ? Reread this comedic milestone for the most preposterous merriment outside of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit," with a bow to WS Gilbert and Sheridan. Wilde found his playwrighting...
Here I mark my salutation again; Oscar Wilde is a remarkably witty genius, a true observant and a sly story teller.How easily he read not only the lips of society but the rationale hidden in their words, the cause for the effect and how beautifully he reverberates in his witty words, the incompre...
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.' . . .in married life three is company and two is none.' Is this play a unique work of art' as Oscar Wilde believed? Or, as a first-night reviewer claimed in 1895, it represents nothing, means nothing, is nothing'? This is for you to decide. . . Cambrid...
Oscar Wilde's madcap farce about mistaken identities, secret engagements, and lovers' entanglements still delights readers more than a century after its 1895 publication and premiere performance. The rapid-fire wit and eccentric characters of "The Importance of Being Earnest" have made it a mains...
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. The hero, the debauched young Alphonse Gris in whom the erotic and stoically philosophical temperaments were so strangely blended, became to Dorian a kind of prefiguring type of himself. The whole book seeme...
It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had ki...
They walked softly, as men do instinctively at night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind made some of the windows rattle. When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the floor, and taking out the key turned it in the lock. ‘You insist on kn...
It is impossible!” he exclaimed, starting back. The painter stared at him. “My dear boy, what nonsense!” he cried. “Do you mean to say you don’t like what I did of you? Where is it? Why have you pulled the screen in front of it? Let me look at it. It is the best thing I ha...
[The room is brilliantly lighted and full of guests. At the top of the staircase stands LADY CHILTERN, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age. She receives the guests as they come up. Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a...