Big Picture Small Picture Archive
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
On the morning of May 18, 1980, nine years after The Lathe of Heaven first appeared, Mt. St. Helens erupts just seventy miles north of Portland, sending a roiling shaft of smoke nine miles into the atmosphere.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon
Valentine’s Day, 1930. Dashiell Hammett’s genre-establishing detective novel The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco where the author lives, is published.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
In January 1959 Chinua Achebe’s debut novel, Things Fall Apart, is first published in the US. The novel follows Okonkwo, a leader in the Igbo tribe, as he negotiates personal tragedy amid the arrival of British Colonial forces into Africa in the late nineteenth century.