Shirley Hazzard0.0 The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr.2.0 In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson’s killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell’s narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.
Walker Percy0.0 Will Barrett (also the hero of Percy's The Last Gentleman) is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more. Percy’s stirring sequel to The Last Gentleman: the offbeat story of how a man’s midlife crisis finally leads him to happiness
Энн Тайлер3.5 Конец 1960-х. Моргану за 40, у него косматая борода, из-за которой он выглядит гораздо старше. Морган – обладатель обширного гардероба из самых причудливых костюмов и удивительных головных уборов, от тропического шлема до наполеоновской треуголки. Каждый день Морган меняет наряды, примеряя новые личины, и в своих странных костюмах он бесцельно прогуливается по улицам, спасаясь от домашней тоски. Его фантазии – бегство из реальности, в которой у него милая, но ничем не примечательная жена, выводок из семи дочерей, несчастливая сестра и полубезумная матушка. Выдумщик Морган заперт внутри своего семейного бытования, ему чудится, что настоящая жизнь, бурная, яркая, необычная, где-то совсем рядом, надо лишь внимательно всматриваться в мир, и однажды он тебе откроется во всем своем многообразии. И как-то раз Морган встречает Эмили и Леона, скитальцев по собственному выбору, показывающих то тут то там кукольные спектакли. И отныне жизнь Моргана меняется…
Эксцентричный, причудливый, ироничный, грустный и очень теплый роман Энн Тайлер о семье, ее радостях и ужасах.
E.L. Doctorow0.0 It is America in the great depression, and he is a child of that time, that place. He runs away from home in Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City and learns the bare bones of life before he hits the road with a traveling carnival. Then one icy night in the Adirondacks, the young man sees a private train roar by. In its lit windows, he spies an industrial tycoon, a poet, a gangster, and a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. He follows them, as one follows a dream, to an isolated private estate on Loon Lake.
Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of mystery and menace, greed and ambition, harsh lust and tender love, that lays bare the darkest depths of the human heart and the nightmarish underside of the American dream. E. L. Doctorow has written a novel aglow with poetry and passion, lit by the burning fire of humanity and history, terror and truth.
Рональд Стил0.0 The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a magisterial figure who relished his role as an insider, an adviser to presidents, a shaper & sometime purveyor of government policy. Drawing on conversations with Lippmann & exclusive access to his private papers, Ronald Steel documents the broad flow of Lippmann's career from his brilliant Harvard days & his role in helping formulate Wilson's Fourteen Points in World War I to his bitter break with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. Written with clarity & objectivity, this definitive biography presents a commanding portrait of a complicated man & "guides its reader through the first three-quarters of this American century"--The New Yorker.
Джеймс Шайлер0.0 "The flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and effects of light that Schuyler describes with such �lan, even if only glimpsed from the window of his apartment, could easily be transposed to the poetry written in Japan or Persia many centuries ago. Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost to pass unnoticed, link his verse to other and larger traditions, as in this reflection on Baudelaire - clearly intended as an artistic credo of sorts ..." - Open Letters Monthly
Хелен Вендлер0.0 Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes the distance. She keeps the poet in view not only as thinker and artist, but as a man or woman whose humanity never disappears in her analysis. With her penetrating critical gift, Vendler assesses American poets from T. S. Eliot to Charles Wright.
Барбара Новак0.0 In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling.
Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form.
"An impressive achievement."
--Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review
"An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole."
--Robert Hughes, Time Magazine
Пол Фасселл0.0 A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.
Vladimir Nabokov3.5 For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses.
