Walker Percy2.8 The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
Джозеф Хеллер4.2 Роман Джозефа Хеллера «Поправка-22» — один из самых блистательных образцов полуабсурдистского, фантасмагорического произведения, по первому изданию известного у нас как «Уловка-22». Вся эта гиперболизированная художественная панорама армейской жизни во время Второй мировой войны оправдана обобщающим обличением чудовищной нелепости войны вообще, войны как таковой.
Джером Д. Сэлинджер4.1 Писатель-классик, писатель-загадка, на пике карьеры объявивший об уходе из литературы и поселившийся вдали от мирских соблазнов в глухой американской провинции. Его книги, включая культовый роман "Над пропастью во ржи", стали переломной вехой в истории мировой литературы и сделались настольными для многих поколений бунтарей: от битников и хиппи до представителей современных радикальных молодежных движений.
Повести "Фрэнни" и "Зуи" по праву входят в золотой фонд сокровищницы всемирной литературы.
Ричард Йейтс3.9 Это история Фрэнка и Эйприл Уилер - умной, красивой и талантливой супружеской пары, изнывающей от банальности пригородного быта. Фрэнк работает клерком в крупной нью-йоркской фирме, Эйприл дома воспитывает детей и мечтает об актерской карьере - но они стремятся к чему-то большему, чему-то исключительному. И вот им предоставляется уникальный шанс - уехать в Париж, начать все с чистого листа…
Как только "Дорога перемен" увидела свет, роман сразу был провозглашен "литературным шедевром" (Теннеси Уильямс) и ""Великим Гэтсби" для новых времен" (Курт Воннегут).
Книга вошла в шорт-лист главной литературной награды США - Национальной книжной премии и послужила основой для крупнобюджетной драмы Сэма Мендеса с Леонардо ДиКаприо и Кейт Уинслет в главных ролях (впервые вместе после "Титаника"!).
Bernard Malamud0.0 In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.
When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.
A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.
Уильям Максвелл0.0 It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at the Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish for.
Эдвард Льюис Уоллант0.0 For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called “survivors” could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer.
At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman’s dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie.)
Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. That this novel, a National Book Award finalist, manages to be both funny and weighty, makes it all the more tragic that its talented author died, at age 36, the year after its publication. The book sold more than 500,000 copies soon after it was published.
Джоан Уильямс0.0 The Morning and the Evening, originally published in 1961 and winner of the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, signaled the arrival of a writer of first-rate talent. Set in the small town of Marigold, Mississippi, The Morning and the Evening tells the story of Jake Darby, mute, and to most of his fellow townspeople, "not quite right in the head." At age forty, he is as innocent and trusting as a child. When his mother, with whom he has lived in a run-down farmhouse, dies, Jake is left at the mercy of the people of Marigold, and the tragic nature of what ensues forms the heart of this moving novel. The Morning and the Evening is a work of unusual maturity, warmth, and vision. It is Joan Williams' unerring understanding of human emotions - of our stumbling, groping search for love in a world that can be unspeakably cruel - that gives this novel its power and resonance
Алан Дуган0.0 Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Lewis Mumford4.2 The city’s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. “One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century”
