REST ASSURED, THERE ARE GREAT BOOKS!
And We're Writing More!
We believe that the goal of education is not to fill a vessel, but rather it is to kindle a spark. Our primary goal in the entire Beaconway Press enterprise is to awaken our peers to the romance in reading. Listed below are a few of our very favorite Great Texts and authors. Shakespeare is the keystone of the Western literary tradition, and the rest of the works can serve as formidable building blocks to one's soul, if one reads them to the depths with which they were written. They comprise a small library, but it's a start for a generation who have yet to be touched by The Classics.The esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom said that if he could take one book to a desert island, it would be the complete works of Shakespeare, and if he could take two, the second would be The Bible, and if he had to choose a third, that's when things would get complicated. All of the poetry and prose published by Beaconway Press is composed in the spirit and context of these great works. Check out Beaconway's New Literature!
We also have compiled a list of Western authors whose work defines a more extensive canon. The list is based on the four year core curriculum of St. John's college.
Check out another more extensive reading list, with direct links to the e-classics.
For a listing of colleges which have more traditional curriculums, check out our list borrowed from Project Gutenberg, as well as the Yahoo list of electronic texts !
THE HUMBLE BEACONWAY LIBRARY MOBY DICK
BILLY BUDD
The writings of MARK TWAIN and especially THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
THE COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE and especially HAMLET
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
THE CONSTITUTION
PLATO'S DIALOGUES
THE BIBLE
DEDICATION OF THE BEACONWAY LIBRARY:
Nobody has time to read everything. So if one's going to read anything, one might as well read the Great Books. We've had enough of this liberal nonesense that all works of literature are equal in merit. If somebody isn't willing to defend, with logic and reason, their definition of a great book, then they have no right to be in academia.
I went to Princeton, so I know that in earning a Bachelors of the Arts degree it is not necessarily required that one reads Hamlet, or Plato's Dialogues, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the Constitution, or The Declaration of Independence, or Moby Dick, or anything that Nietzsche ever wrote. It was never required of me to read Milton, or Donne, or Limbaugh, or Dostoyevsky, or Jefferson. Here I was, at Princeton University, and nobody cared what I thought, except for the physicist John Wheeler, who clenched his fist one day, while we were discussing the Tempest, and told me that today's culture lacked the noble.
Instead of Shakepeare I had some big-wig contemporary names. I had Toni Morrison in this one creative writing class where she taught us how to write long fiction, like novels and things. The assigned reading consisted of books penned by her narrow and skewed definition of minorities. All the books had her endorsement stamped 'cross the back cover, and I forget what they were about.
I also had Joyce Carol Oates twice, even though she tried to kick me out the first time, and both times she assigned us anthologies of her buddies' short stories that she'd pasted together. They sucked. In class she often mentioned the "renaissance" that was taking place in the short story form, and that had me perplexed for awhile. For nobody I knew read the stories-- they meant absolutely nothing to the man on the street. Then it hit me. I realized that was exactly the way she wanted it. If normal people read her crap, she would not be considered a writer. She and her willing accomplices in the liberal press were conducting a stealth renaissance, subsidizing their literary journals with the tuition and taxes of the people they pretended to serve. Her arrogance continues to be supported by the political theory that she can write as well as Shakespeare, now that no men are oppressing her. And if you suggest that her work sucks, like we do, a liberal will use that to conclude that it is yet too early to abandon affirmative action. They have it all figured out-- we need more government programs to help the oppressed write the great literature, 'cause men have been hoggin' the literary arts for far too long. Some of 'em ought to go and make laser printers, and open things up a bit for the rest. But you can't pray a lie, and the truth is that the government does not create rugged individuals nor authors. It can only destroy them.
Melville's Harvard and Yale had been the deck of a whaling ship, and Twain's training as a writer was received while piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. Being a part of the real world, they learned to write with words that meant things. Joyce Carol Oates never developed a similar sentiment within her soul while sailing the liberal bureaucracy into the sea of nihilism, where it's currently sinking. What she writes means nothing to me-- only the fact that she commandeers a position at a great University like Princeton is of significance. And I also had Russel Banks for a semester.
By far the best creative writing teacher I had at Princeton was the late playwrite Harry Kondoleon. In his class we were assigned texts including, King Lear, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Look Back in Anger. He often expressed the view that one should stick to teaching the classics, the tried and true, if one was going to teach anything. He also told us that he was there for the money, primarily, because he wasn't too sure creative writing could be taught. He also thought that Oliver Stone was an idiot, which was cool. He was always up-front and honest in his criticisms, which of course detracted from his popularity with some of the students. But nevertheless, the honesty he professed made him the best creative writing teacher-- the only creative writing teacher-- I ever had at Princeton. He possessed the element that a writer cannot endow a piece of paper with if he does not have it himself-- he had character. And so I dedicate the Beaconway library to him, and all creative writing teachers who possess the courage and depth of soul to be honest.
THE RED AVENGERS OF ALL THAT IS RIGHT AND TRUE, AND STUFF,
Drake "Red Avenger" Raft Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham Elliot "Ahab" Mcgucken
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