The annotated edition of the renowned author's last novel: a tale of an English village celebrating the nation's history as WWII looms.Between the Acts takes place on a June day in 1939 at Pointz Hall, the Oliver family's country house in the heart of England. In the garden, everyone from the village has gathered to present the annual pageant—scenes from the history of England starting with the Middle Ages. As the story of England unfolds, the lives of the villagers also take shape. The past blends with the present and art blends with life in a narrative full of invention and lyricism.Through her character's passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's final novel both celebrates and satirizes Englishness. This edition of Between the Acts features annotation and an introduction by literary critic and Virginia Woolf specialist Melba Cuddy-Keane. Views: 637
Featuring all of American author Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, this collection reveals the author’s contemplations on religion, morality, and fate, set against the backdrop of the American South. The collection contains O’Connor’s most famous works of short fiction, including “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and reveals her many significant contributions to the Southern Gothic genre.
Though she met with only mild popularity during her short life, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories have since been recognized as important works of American literature, and the original anthology of her complete stories won the National Book Award for fiction in 1972, seven years after her death.
HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library. Views: 636
On New Year's Eve in 1969, a novelist in his forties meets the beautiful movie actress Diana Soren at a party and is fascinated by her oddly elusive charm. But in this novel from Carlos Fuentes, his infatuation turns into doomed pursuit as the fleeting object of his desire spurns him, and he is forced to reconsider the foundations of his life as a writer. Views: 636
The internationally acclaimed author Carlos Fuentes, winner of the Cervantes Prize and the Latin Civilization Award, delivers a stunning work of fiction about family and love across an expanse of Mexican life, reminding us why he has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek).
In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy’s classic observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In “A Family Like Any Other,” each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In “The Mariachi’s Mother,” the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son’s wounds. “Sweethearts” reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes’s trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love.
In this spectacular translation, the acclaimed Edith Grossman captures the full weight of Fuentes’s range. Whether writing in the language of the street or in straightforward, elegant prose, Fuentes gives us stories connected by love, including the failure of love–between spouses, lovers, parents and children, siblings. From the Mexican presidential palace to the novels of the poor and the vast expanse of humanity in between, Happy Families is a magnificent portrait of modern life in all its complicated beauty, as told by one of the world’s most celebrated writers.
Praise for Carlos Fuentes
Winner of the Cervantes Prize
The Old Gringo *
“A dazzling novel that possesses the weight and resonance of myth [and] the fierce magic of a remembered dream.”
–The New York Times
The Death of Artemio Cruz *
“Remarkable in the scope of the human drama it pictures, the corrosive satire and sharp dialogue.”
*–The New York Times Book Review *
The Years with Laura Díaz *
“Reading this magnificent novel is like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel. . . . The breadth and enormity of this accomplishment is breathtaking.”
–The Denver Post
This I Believe *
“Engaging, offering surprising conclusions, provocations or turns of phrase . . . Put down the page-turner and dare to drink these full-bodied, red, shining words.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
*
The Eagle’s Throne *
“Dazzling, razor-sharp . . . prescient . . . a feast of political insight.”
–The Washington Post Book World
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 632
“The Mick Jagger of literature . . . Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction.” —Mick Brown, The Daily Telegraph“[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction . . . Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York TimesFrom one of the most highly acclaimed writers at work today: his most intimate and epic work yet—an autobiographical novel of sex and love, family and friendship.This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch), Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe... Views: 630
At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated.
In this stunning critical assessment, John Berger−one of this century's most insightful cultural historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost−in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create. Views: 623
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, Britain's relationship with America seems to have intensified. Through an analysis of its various manifestations - from James Bond to Winston Churchill - this book asks what this relationship consists of. Views: 622
A selection of the best of the hilarious free-verse poems by the irreverent cockroach poet Archy and his alley-cat pal Mehitabel.
Don Marquis’s famous fictional insect appeared in his newspaper columns from 1916 into the 1930s, and he has delighted generations of readers ever since. A poet in a former life, Archy was reincarnated as a bug who expresses himself by diving headfirst onto a typewriter. His sidekick Mehitabel is a streetwise feline who claims to have been Cleopatra in a previous life. As E. B. White wrote in his now-classic introduction, the Archy poems “contain cosmic reverberations along with high comedy” and have “the jewel-like perfection of poetry.”
Adorned with George Herriman’s whimsical illustrations and including White’s introduction, our Pocket Poets selection—the only hardcover Archy and Mehitabel in print—is a beautiful volume, and perfectly sized for its tiny hero. Views: 613
In this witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls" the romantic time." His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy landowner, kidnaps the baby of a prominent judge, replacing it with the black baby of a prostitute. When he catches sight of the baby's mother, though, he falls instatnly in love with her and sets off on an anguished journey to repent his act and win her love. Views: 612
A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 590
Home parallels the story told in Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. It is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith.
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions. Views: 583
Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time. Views: 581
LIVING LIFE AT THE UN PLAZA" LIFE AT THE UNITED NATIONS PLAZA AS A KID BY LESLIE SIEGEL NOVELIST! A TRUE LIFE NOVEL BY NOVELIST LESLIE SIEGEL! THE OSBERG FAMILY LIVED AT THE UN PLAZA IN NEW YORK CITY DURING THE 60's & 70's! LIVIN' AT THE UN PLAZA IS ABOUT THE OSBERG FAMILY WHO LIVED AT THE UN PLAZA!After the Ice Age, the world as we know now looked quite different. While glaciers began to melt all over the planet, water levels started to rise 300 feet, swallowing any evidence of cultures living near the ancient coastlines. However, in the last five decades, archeologists have found new civilizations older than the Egyptians and Sumerians, dating back twelve-thousand years. As history has to be rewritten, we have to ponder who were the heroes and antagonists of a forgotten time of the Atlanteans Views: 573
A literary treasure of over one hundred unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O'Connor is a master of 20th-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith that informed all she wrote and did. Good Things out of Nazareth, a much-anticipated collection of many of O'Connor's unpublished letters, along with those of literary luminaries such as Walker Percy (author of The Moviegoer), Robert Giroux, Caroline Gordon (author of None Shall Look Back), Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools), and movie critic Stanley Kauffmann, explores such themes as creativity, faith, suffering, and writing. Brought together they form a riveting literary portrait of these friends, artists, and... Views: 566
