Absalom, Absalom!
1936 · 313 pages
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere with a band of slaves and a French architect and builds a dynasty that destroys itself. Two students retell it until it swallows them.
★ 9.0
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1936
Showing 50 works across all media from 1936
Modern Times
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1936
Chaplin's farewell to silence, made nine years into the sound era out of pure stubbornness: the factory gears swallow him, and he answers the talkies entirely on his own terms.
★ 8.7
Cross Road Blues
1936 · From King of the Delta Blues Singers
Two takes in a San Antonio hotel room, Johnson's slide answering his own voice; the devil came later.
★ 7.9
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
1936 · 403 pages
Keynes argues that an economy can sit at mass unemployment indefinitely because nobody is spending, and that governments must spend instead. Every recession since has been argued in the terms he set.
★ 7.1
USA Trilogy
1936 · 1288 pages
No American novel takes in more of the country. Dos Passos cuts fictional lives against newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and portraits of Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson, covering the century's first three decades.
★ 7.0
Selected Verse
1936 · 405 pages
Lorca's poems rise from Andalusian folk song and dream logic, where the moon walks into a forge and knives are always waiting. His lament for a gored bullfighter tolls five in the afternoon.
★ 6.9
Gone with the Wind
1936 · 960 pages
Scarlett O'Hara claws her plantation back through the burning of Atlanta, wanting the wrong man. Mitchell's romance of a gallant South sold thirty million copies and fixed a pastoral memory of slavery.
★ 6.7
Wabash CannonballRoy Acuff
Wabash Cannonball
1936
Recorded in 1936 with someone else singing lead, then cut again by Acuff in 1947, a train that never existed.
★ 5.6
★ 5.3
A Little History of the World
1936 · 284 pages
History is a bottomless well, Gombrich tells his young reader: drop a burning scrap of paper down it and watch. Forty chapters carry you from the first humans to his own century.
★ 5.2
Double Indemnity
1936 · 115 pages
Walter Huff sells insurance, and the wife who wants a policy on her husband starts him on the clause that pays double. Cain tells it as a confession and never slows down.
★ 5.2
At the Mountains of Madness
1936 · 192 pages
Antarctic explorers find a stone city older than mankind, its history painted on the walls. Lovecraft's real monster is deep time, and this novella is where his cosmic dread reaches full scale.
★ 5.0
Swing Time
Directed by George Stevens
1936
Astaire and Rogers never danced better than in the last number here, which they shot until her feet bled: the plot is nonsense and the dancing is the argument for the whole genre.
★ 5.0
The Story of Ferdinand
1936 · 32 pages
A young bull who would rather smell flowers than fight is hauled to the Madrid ring, where he sits down. Franco banned the book in Spain and the Nazis burned it in Germany.
★ 4.5
When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
Shooting an Elephant · 1936