Stories, conversations and highlights from the world of books and culture.
This remarkable writer was a German-born American psychoanalyst, social philosopher, and humanist thinker, whose works had a profound impact on psychology, sociology, and philosophy. His ideas about freedom, love, authority and social structures shaped the modern understanding of the human psyche and relationships in society.
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in the provincial, sleepy town of Aracataca, located in the tropical area of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He does not have a close relationship with his parents, and although he has eleven brothers and sisters, he was raised as an only child. He grows up with his grandmother, an excellent storyteller, who believed in magic, and his grandfather, a retired colonel from the Civil War and a great opponent of all forms of ty
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The winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Knut Hamsun, was born in 1859 in Norway. When he turned five, the family moved to the north of the country, and the specific landscape of that climate and the rural community left a strong impression on the young writer. Later, this will especially come to the fore in Hamsun's books, because it is the relationship between the individual, culture and nature that is the main theme of his novels. Even as a boy, he separated from his family and went to l
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Since he grew up in a Christian environment, they directed him to join the ministry and sent him to a seminary. Hermann didn't do very well there. Soon he began to suffer from insomnia and chronic headaches. He was taken to a pastor for treatment, but his health further deteriorated due to his unrequited love for the priest's daughter, which brought him almost to the brink of suicide. Broken, he goes to a sanatorium. Fortunately, after a few months, Hesse managed to recover and, due to his good
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Although today words like "damn" or "bastard" do not sound so intriguing, in the 1950s such speech was banned in schools around the world. Moreover, teachers were losing their jobs because of putting that book on the reading list. The American writer's writing style is characterized by a peculiar use of dialogue and a focus on the inner life of the protagonist. It uses everyday language, sentences usually vary in length, and in this way it actually imitates natural speech patterns. Shorter sente
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One April afternoon, while watching a baseball game at the stadium, Haruki Murakami was overcome with a strong feeling that he could write a novel. That day everything changed in his life. He went home and started writing. The Japanese writer was born in 1949 in Kyoto, during the baby boom after World War II. He probably inherited his passion for writing from his parents who were Japanese language teachers. In a 2019 article, Murakami shared a memory of his father, Chiaki. Every morning, before
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The writer grew up surrounded by music, literature and art. His parents recognized his talents and instilled in him a love of learning. He loved to read and observe the world around him. He grew up in politically turbulent times, which significantly influenced him, so he found comfort and inspiration in the works of great writers such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Camus. According to some biographers, Kundera had an extremely difficult time making decisions in life, and the cause of this indecision
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He spent his childhood in solitude, surrounded by a nanny, a cook and a maid. He suffered from being left to himself, as well as from a lack of emotional connection with his parents who spent most of their time working in their shop. Franz's father was extremely authoritarian, and his gentle mother was not strong enough to stand up to him. Although the writer strongly identified with his mother's relatives, due to their spirituality, delicate physical structure and melancholic nature, he was not
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821 in Moscow. A sensitive child from a family where his father was strict and his mother was kind, he was close to his brother Mihail and sister Varvara. In his youth, he was a sensitive and attentive child and deeply felt human suffering.
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