Charis Tom

About the author

1984 Has Been Filmed Five Times. None of Them Has Understood the Last Scene.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been adapted repeatedly because filmmakers are drawn to its atmosphere. The surveillance. The gray architecture. The omnipresent fear. The...

Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as the Psychological Manual the West Refused

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is usually discussed as a political text, an anti-colonial work, or a foundational book in postcolonial theory. All...

Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy and the Quiet Argument That Therapy Is a Form of Reading

Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy is often described as a book about death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Those are the four existential concerns that structure...

The Three Sentences That Hold Never Let Me Go Together

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go does not reveal its emotional power all at once. The novel moves quietly. Conversations drift. Memories overlap. Important...

Why the Last Word of The Road Is the Word That Was There All Along

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is filled with silence. The novel strips language down to its bare essentials, leaving readers in a world where almost...

The Cigarette in Brave New World: A Single Object Atwood Borrowed and What She Did With It

Some literary symbols are loud and impossible to miss. Others sit quietly in the background, appearing ordinary until you realize they carry the emotional...

What Offred Doesn’t Say: The Architecture of Silence in The Handmaid’s Tale

There is a particular kind of attention that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale asks of its readers, and almost no readers are equipped to...

The Telescreen Is the Wrong Metaphor: What Orwell Actually Said About Being Watched

There is a near-universal cultural shorthand for surveillance, and it has been doing damage for several decades. The shorthand is the telescreen. The device in...

Lord of the Flies Is Not About Children. It’s About What the Adults Trained Them to Become

There is a way Lord of the Flies gets taught, and the way is one of the most consistent misreadings in twentieth-century English literature. The...

The Time Machine Was the First Dystopia, and It Already Knew Everything

There is a quiet fact about the history of dystopian fiction that almost no general reader registers. When people are asked to name the foundational...

Animal Farm Is the Saddest Book Orwell Ever Wrote, and Nobody Teaches It That Way

There is a particular way Animal Farm gets taught, and the way is wrong in a small but important sense. The book is presented, in...

The Forgotten Architecture of We: Reading Zamyatin’s Glass Apartments as Political Theory

There is an exercise worth performing before reading any further. Picture, as clearly as you can, the apartments in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. If you have...
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Categories

AdaptationsAfrican & Diasporic DystopiaBetween the LinesContemporary DystopiaCrossover DystopiaDystopian ClassicsPsychologyReal World Dystopias
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