The Philistines
By Arlo Bates
- Release Date: 2023-09-16
- Genre: Classics
Description
Arlo Bates’s The Philistines is a sharply observed portrait of ambition, art, and social pretense in Gilded Age America—a novel that dissects the clash between genuine creativity and the hollowness of fashionable culture. With wit as precise as a scalpel, Bates follows a circle of aspiring artists, patrons, and social climbers whose lofty ideals collide with vanity, jealousy, and self-deception. Elegant, satirical, and surprisingly modern, The Philistines offers readers a revealing glimpse into a world where everyone wants to be seen as refined—but only a few dare to be truly authentic. This is literary realism at its most incisive and entertaining.
