Itself a great and wonderfully versatile source of reading, the Hit&Run blog has the below recommendation for your summer beach read:
English majors may fondly recall novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne for enthralling works like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. But few seem to have read Hawthorne's brilliant 1852 satire The Blithedale Romance, which draws on his frustrating experiences with the short-lived utopian community called Brook Farm. [...]
The Blithedale Romance is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and darkly tragic, and its ending packs a wallop. In a world where so-called intentional businesses, foundations, and communities built around shared moral purposes are all the rage, the novel should be required reading. It reminds us that even the best intentions are rarely strong enough to overrule either the longings of the human heart or the basic laws of economics.
Read the whole thing here (shouldn't require log-in or subscription).
The source. Or you may try these reads by Ed Stevens.
See also Willa Cather of Nebraska, Best Novels ... Part I, and Best Novels ... Part II.
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