Lu Xun: A Madman's Diary

Another short one! I'm dying to get on with a longer work though, and I have several waiting for me to get around to them, so hang in there. This, of course, is as interesting as the title suggests. The narrator is experiencing extreme paranoia, seeing things and imagining things and above all convinced that everyone wants to eat him, even his own brother. It isn't very long, so you'll forgive me for having very little to report! (Lu Xun/ aka. Zhou Shuren: 1881-1936)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper

I've read this before, and it's very short, so it hardly counts for the purposes of this blog, but if you haven't read "The Yellow Wallpaper," you definitely should. Gilman is one of the few American writers (Connecticut) that I'm interested in. She deals with the social conditions of middle class and upper class women at the turn of the 19th century (1899 to 1900s). In this story, a woman is slowly driven insane by her husband/ physician, who has prescribed a strict regimen of rest and solitude to "cure" the narrator of post-partum depression. Her objective correlative, in this case, is the horrible yellow wallpaper that lines the room to which she is "confined" day and night. A quick read, and one I really recommend.