Glaring omissions

I am painfully aware of the many glaring omissions with regards to the Phase One content of this site, whose task is to offer you your favorite novels in t-shirt form. All I can do is apologise and say: 'I know. And, 'I'm sorry.' And to include a non-exhaustive list below of the writers whose work I hope to steadily filter into the Quite Literary pantheon via Phase Two (the Ones that got away) of our project.

So here are those groups of authors whose works I intend to read or re-read very soon with a view to including their most meaningful quotes on our t-shirts, hoodies, mugs and...coming soon...towels. 

Those fantastic Frenchies: In particular from the work of Cezanne's best mate Emile ZOLA. I must find time to trawl for brilliance in this sublime detective of the human condition. Following that we must also seek out arresting quotes from the best of his compatriots: Marcel PROUST, Gustave FLAUBERT, and Alexandre DUMAS...to mention but a very few!

Time, that most elusive of commodities.

The great Russians: Albeit we do stock t-shirts inspired by the wonderful Alexandr SOLZHENITSYN, we have omitted such luminaries as TOLSTOY, DOSTOYEVSKY and CHEKHOV. Unforgivable? Perhaps. In my defence re-reading their epics is a bit of a labour of love, for as much as I love these guys, each one of their grand masterpieces requires a good deal of time and commitment to do them justice, and these are qualities that are in short supply for all of us. Not to mention the heavy emotional toll that reading them exacts. If a Tolstoy short story can drain you, it's conceivable that a monumental tome like Anna Karenina could take months/years off of your life.

On a far lighter note, one great Czech that simply had to be included is Jaroslav HASEK whose indisputable classic The Good Soldier Švejk has stayed with me for decades after first reading it. It seems inconceivable too that Scott FITZGERALD's underrated masterpiece Tender is the Night is not already in the site, but it's a re-read that (again) I want to do justice to. And full disclosure, last time reading it kind of ripped me apart a little. And I'm still in recovery.

Tender is the Night tops the list

We will certainly be hearing more from Joseph CONRAD, particularly from his lesser known but stunning works Chance (featuring perhaps the Fyne dog, one of the greatest in all of literature) and Victory, and also from the more widely acclaimed Nostromo. 

As painful as it is to do this, as things stand I have had to put the following authors on a to-do list: Saul Bellow, John Bunyan, Lewis Carroll, Stephen Crane, Somerset Maugham, V S Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, D H Lawrence, Laurence Sterne, and even Nathaniel Hawthorne, Christopher Isherwood and Ernest Hemingway, dammit!

And shamefully I have had to add to that esteemed list the names of Elizabeth Bowen, Harper Lee, Anita Loos, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Muriel Spark, and Penelope Fitzgerald. These extraordinary and often groundbreaking women have penned works that I love and that belong in the classical canon. But again, a searingly brilliant novel like Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight is a tough re-read, and when your emotional resources have been drained by Dostoyevsky, there's not much left!

And then there are the mighty Poets, who I have with deep regret had to exclude virtually entirely from this first phase. For although they too are irresistible, and loved...they have proven to be just too problematic. Often the sheer volume of work that they produce precludes them from entry into the current collections. Some excerpts from Langston Hughes' and Elizabeth Bishop's exceptional poems have great personal significance for me but fall into this category, while Tennyson and Shakespeare are wonderful but so widely quoted as to warrant exclusion by dint of being too popular. And I simply don't have the time to re-read the poems or plays, select 'original' quotes, design contextually appropriate material and upload these onto the website. Excluding The Goat is galling but I have had to be fairly brutal in choosing to focus exclusively on the novelists. 

By virtue of popularity

Having thus attempted to explain away my mistreatment of the Goat, I must now do the same for several other iconic authors. For there are more writers whose novels are either too well known, too universally quoted or whose bodies of work are simply too extensive to work my way through. That is not to say that the the authors listed below aren't absolutely brilliant. Or that these might not be investigated at some stage...but only after I've trawled through the huge mountain of majestic works produced by the legends listed above: 

Agatha Christie, Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Chandler, the great Mark Twain, and the just-as-great-if-not-greater Dr Seuss! 

Out in the cold

And finally, here are a few of the authors that are unlikely to be arriving on your doorstep in t-shirt form anytime soon, for all sorts of reasons! Some I've tried and failed to read, while others have left me feeling alternately cold, angry or deflated:

Left me Cold: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes and Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Made me Mad: Even though this book seems to be many people's absolute favourite: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for its many frustrating inconsistencies!  And finally, in the 'left feeling deflated' category: George Eliot 's The Mill on the Floss. For oh, so many reasons.

Many others are unfortunately just too highbrow for my tiny brain to fully grasp: this includes all of William Faulkner, and the probably awesome, but for me unreadable Doris Lessing.

And finally of course, it is unlikely that I'll be producing John Milton t-shirts, simply because that man's entire oeuvre is so clinically dispatched in Candide by Voltaire's mighty anti-hero, the awesomely cynical Pococurante!