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Tonight readers, writers, and television obsessives will crowd around television sets, following the tricky plot of Lost–a TV show loaded with countless literary allusions. To help you prepare, GalleyCat Reviews has collected literary criticism about our favorite books from Lost.
First, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares is this GalleyCat editor’s favorite Lost book. Here’s an excerpt from a review by Seamus Sweeney: “Borges’ comparison with The Turn of the Screw is apt – it is an eerie, brief masterpiece, of the right duration to make for a supremely vivid afternoon’s reading.”
Next, Flannery O’Connor‘s short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge played a key role at the end of last season. The brilliant Joyce Carol Oates reviewed her work in this essay: “O’Connor’s plainspoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish, and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable … these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.”‘
Flavorpill also rounded up their favorite lost books, briefly reviewing Valis by Philip K. Dick. Here’s an excerpt: “Narrated by a fictionalized Dick and his protagonist proxy Horselover Fat, the book is an extended, at times utterly surreal, meditation on the pursuit of religion and philosophical query. Addressing doctrines like Christianity, Gnosticism, and Taoism, the story is a subtly paced romp toward the meaning of life.”
Finally, last week we uncovered one New Directions title that will be featured in the upcoming season.