Over the last few months, we have been rebuilding our process for creating the PDFs and will start uploading new ones as we create them. We started with our most popular book, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We will continue to fine tune the process. The goal is to have the highest quality free downloadable books.

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Continuing the thoughts about imperialism and Conrad, we just added a new title by Valentine Chirol, a British high imperialist, meaning he was unequivocal in his belief that “advanced” societies could uplift “primitive” societies. These pro-imperial arguments often focus on the benefits to the colonized, as opposed to the benefits to the colonizers which are certainly [...]

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I continue to struggle with the theory that Heart of Darkness exposes Conrad as a racist. It seems impossible to read the story as anything but an indictment of colonialism and imperialism, and the racism inherent in those enterprises. If a reader wanted to accept a revisionist interpretation, Heart of Darkess could be an proto-indictment [...]

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Heart of Darkness by Conrad has been the most-read book on Ria Press since we started tracking such things. More than a century after publication, Heart of Darkness serves now as shorthand for doomed voyages, man’s savage tendencies, imperialism and racism. Its timelessness lives on in Apocalypse Now and other variations and reinterpretations. Incredibly to me, some modern readers insist Conrad himself was a racist. This seems like the ultimate in [...]

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