In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the February–March 2023 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+5, -1), our 65th topic challenge will be
the works of Arthur Koestler (1905 – 1983)
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main Meta post. In short, during February and March 2023 you are invited to try to get hold of a work in sign language and ask questions about it.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during February and March too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of one or more works by Arthur Koestler and
- asking good questions about it or
- answering questions that have been posted as part of this challenge or
- writing a review of a book by or about Koestler on our Tumblr blog.
Questions about these works should be tagged arthur-koestler and the work's title (if it is a book-length work). We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Below is Tsundoku's presentation:
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. He was born in Budapest and grew up mainly in Austria. He became a member of the Communist Party of Germany in 1931, from which he resigned in 1938 because he had become disillusioned by Stalinism. His works include the following:
- The Gladiators (novel, 1939). On the surface, this novel is about the effects of the Spartacus revolt in the Roman Republic, but it focuses on the theme of idealism going wrong.
- Darkness at Noon (novel, 1940): the novel that made him famous. It is set during the Stalinist Great Purge of 1939. Curiously, Koestler's original manuscript was lost for almost 80 years and was first translated into English in 2019.
- Arrival and Departure (novel, 1943). In his review, George Orwell thought it contained "one of the most shocking descriptions of Nazi terrorism that have ever been written".
- The Act of Creation (1964)
- The Ghost in the Machine (1967; philosophical psychology)
- The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1969)
- Janus: A Summing Up (1978). This book develops the concept of holarchy, which "provides a coherent way of organizing knowledge and nature all together" (Wikipedia).
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge or propose your own!