Collected Essays: Volume Two

Collected Essays: Volume Two is King’s sixth book and, as the title makes blatantly clear, his second collection of essays. Whilst King is not an expert in anything, he certainly is enthusiastic about an array of different subjects. King takes you on a scattershot adventure that traverses millennia and an incongruous mix of subjects. Do you want to read a book which contains insights into European art films, political philosophy, pre-Socratic philosophy, modernist literature, post-war European history, avant-garde music, the history of ideas, the history of dreams, economic history, New Hollywood cinema and Latin American literature? Well, King might just have the right book for you.

1. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: The Ideals of the French Revolution in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy

2. Perpetual Flux and Unchanging Singularity: The Ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

3. Social Change in the Heimat Trilogy

4. Eccentric Musicians

5. Nascent Liberalism in Antiquity and the Medieval Ages

6. A Very Brief History of Dream Interpretation

7. Economic Decline in the Cinema of the 1970s

8. Imaginary Worlds in Latin American Fiction