Lost Illusions
1843 · 721 pages
Lucien leaves Angouleme certain his poems will make him famous in Paris, and finds literature there is a trade in favors and paid reviews. Balzac invented the modern story of selling out.
★ 7.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Manufacturing Consent
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
1988 · 407 pages
The press needs no censors, Herman and Chomsky argue: ownership, advertisers, official sources and the fear of blowback filter the news first. Every argument about media bias since has had to answer them.
★ 6.8
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
1974 · 103 pages
The tabloid Bild-Zeitung had branded Böll a terrorist sympathizer, so he answered with this: a quiet housekeeper spends one night with a wanted man and the papers take her honor apart.
★ 6.3
Scoop
1938 · 304 pages
Mistaken for a famous novelist with the same surname, a nature columnist who writes about questing voles is shipped off to cover an African war. Reporters still quote Waugh's newsroom to each other.
★ 6.0
The Journalist and the Murderer
1990 · 163 pages
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
★ 5.3