Word: tormenting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken. Well cut, correct and a trifle oldfashioned, the author's short stories deal brilliantly with inward torment but less well with events; the best of them are of a very high order indeed...
...describes love affairs frequently, but writes less well of men and women than of men alone. Events are less important to him than inward torment, and consequently his prose is rich in soliloquies and barren of drama. But within these limitations his best stories are of a very high order, and they might seem the product of genius rather than of painstaking craftsmanship if one could not see the techniques of their construction in other, slightly less successful stories in the collection. The familiar Silent Snow, Secret Snow is the prize of the lot-a brilliant evocation of a young...
...LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, by Nikos Kazantzakis. To this excellent Greek writer, God and man were one. His last book, a biographical novel of Christ, reflects the spiritual torment of the man who wrote it. His Christ is neither the Jesus who is worshipped as the Son of God nor Jesus the gentle teacher bereft of divinity, but a man who experienced a sense of divine mission and achieved it only by conquering his own weaknesses and fears...
There are some tourists who find Asia an endless torment. They are dismayed by ramshackle hotels, the stupefying odors of human sweat and excrement, the maddening delays and disappointments caused by the faulty Asian time sense. The special quality of the East must be searched for, and tourists who lack energy spend their hours sitting in dank hotel lobbies in Rangoon or Nara or Kuala Lumpur wondering why their travel agents sent them there...
...dynasty of Lamed-Vov called the Levys. The first of the line, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, forces himself to slit the throats of 250 of his coreligionists in an 1185 A.D. pogrom in York, England, rather than have them tortured or converted. After this follows an inexorable litany of torment, in which generation after generation of chosen Levys are burned, torn apart by horses, slashed by Cossacks, impaled on stakes, or drip-tortured in eyes, ears, mouths with molten lead. The rare Just Man who dies in bed regards it as God's inexplicable little joke...