Энн Тайлер3.8 «Случайный турист» – один из самых известных романов Энн Тайлер. И это снова семейная история – о зыбкости отношений и жизни вообще, о вечном конфликте мужского и женского начала, о попытках обрести себя, не вылезая из собственной скорлупы, и их тщетности. Мэйкон Лири пишет путеводители, но он ненавидит путешествия всей душой. Его путеводители – коллекции сведений о том, как в очередной вынужденной и невыносимой поездке ощутить себя как дома, минимизировать вмешательство в твою жизнь чужого и неприятного мира. На долю Мэйкона и его жены выпала страшная трагедия – бессмысленная гибель сына-подростка. С тех пор они словно потерялись в этой жизни, и брак их стремительно разваливается. Отныне каждый пойдет своим путем – случайные туристы, бредущие куда глаза глядят в надежде, что однажды встретят попутчика. Печальный и смешной роман американского классика о том, как страшное и комичное шагают рука об руку, как привычки пытаются заглушить жизнь, как в обыденном таится ужас, а в неведомом – надежда, а может быть, наоборот. Роман был номинирован на Пулитцеровскую премию. Книга была удачно экранизирована, фильм удостоился премии Нью-йоркской ассоциации критиков, а актриса Джина Дэвис получила премию «Оскар».
Richard Powers0.0 In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers's brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and provide the reader with a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.
Питер Тейлор0.0 From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.
Дон Делилло3.8 Роман классика современной американской литературы Дона Делилло (р. 1936) "Белый шум" - комедия о страхе, смерти и технологии. Смерть невозможно отрицать, каждый день она проникает в сознание с телеэкранов и страниц бульварных газет. Каждый день она проникает в тело дозами медикаментов и кислотными дождями. Человеческое сознание распадается под натиском рекламы и прогнозов погоды. Мы боимся смерти - и продолжаем жить. Несмотря на белый шум смерти...
В 1985 году "Белый шум" был удостоен Национальной книжной премии США.
Louise Glück0.0 From the opening line ("It is not the moon, I tell you") Gluck claims absolute control of subject, craft, and perception. We see what we are instructed to see; we understand what Gluck insists we understand. Gluck's sensitivity to emotional nuance is extreme: "I ask you, how much beauty/ can a person bear? It is/ heavier than ugliness, even the burden/ of emptiness is nothing beside it." Her genius lies in her passionate restraint, a mingling of plain and elevated diction, a reliance on indirection and understatement. Resolution and revelation arise from the stately balance of poems which demand order from anarchy: "Why love what you will lose?/ There is nothing else to love." Gluck is foremost among her generation of poets and no collection should be without all four of her full-length books. - Rhoda Yerburgh, English Dept., Vermont Coll., Montpelier
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. (from Library Journal)
William H. Gass0.0 Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 1985 Now a Cornell Paperback--
"These twelve essays take risks, make connections, give off sparks and illustrate Gass's love of language. Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression. . . . Gass writes with impassioned concern."--Publishers Weekly
"[These] essays [are] meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass. . . . He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they're unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word--they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own."--Sam Tanenhaus, Village Voice
"William H. Gass is not alone among . . . American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically."--Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review
Мэри МакКарти0.0 Reading and romance, gardening tips, a farewell to a friend, even an opera retold make up this stellar collection from the bestselling author of "The Group "and "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood"
This intriguing nonfiction collection by Mary McCarthy is a cornucopia of literary delights that challenges the mind and captivates the senses.
"On Rereading a Favorite Book" is McCarthy's reaction to returning to Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina "after more than thirty years. In "Politics and the Novel," she shatters a myth about the American versus European style of storytelling. Acts of reading, when consummated, are akin to "Acts of Love." And "Saying Good-bye to Hannah" is a poignant farewell to the author of "The Human Condition "and, in particular, "The Life of the Mind, "the book Hannah Arendt saw as her crowning achievement.
Whether giving us the story of "La Traviata "in her own words or reviewing a charming and practical book on gardening, McCarthy imbues "Occasional Prose "with her powerful sense of time and place. Uninhibited and uncensored, it filters the world through her unique gifts of observation and novelist's masterful eye for detail. This is a book for anyone interested in the life of the mind--and heart.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate.
Philip Fisher0.0 American culture has often been described in terms of paradigmatic images--the wilderness, the Jeffersonian landscape of family farms, the great industrial cities at the turn of the 19th century. But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes. Settling the land meant banishing the Indians and destroying the wilderness; Jeffersonian landscapes were created with the help of the new country's enslaved citizens; and economic opportunities in the cities were purchased at the high price of self-commercialization. In this study of the popular 19th- and early 20th-century American novel, Philip Fisher demonstrates how such works as Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cooper's The Deerslayer worked to make these three "hard facts" of the 19th-century American experience familiar and tolerable--or familiar and intolerable--to their wide audience of readers. His perceptive analysis proves that the most important cultural "work" was accomplished not by novels generally taken to be at the core of the American literary canon--those of Hawthorne, Melville, or Twain--but rather by books which never abandoned the ambition to be widely read.
Пол А. Робинсон0.0 Opera and Ideas is a study of the connections between music and intellectual history. Through lucid analysis of six operas and two song cycles, Paul Robinson shows how operas give musical and dramatic expression to ideas about the self, society, and history.
Леон Эдель0.0 Генри Джеймс - признанный классик американской литературы. Его книги широко издают и переводят на иностранные языки, творческое наследие усиленно изучают и исследуют. Ему воздают должное как романисту и теоретику романа, как автору рассказов и путевых очерков, критику и мемуаристу.
Книга рассказывает о жизни и творческом пути писателя.
Элизабет Франк0.0 A full-scale biography of the distinguished lyric poet, translator, and critic details the highs and lows of her elegant and sorrowful life and the steady growth and influence of her work.
Джеймс Лорд0.0 The work of one of the towering creative spirits of the century, Alberto Giacometti's visionary sculptures and paintings from a testament to the artist's intriguing life story. From modest beginnings in a Swiss village, Giacometti went on to flourish in the picturesque milieu of prewar Paris and then to achieve international acclaim in the fifties and sixties. Picasso, Balthus, Samuel Beckett, Stravinsky and Sartre have parts in his story, along with flamboyant art dealers, whores, shady drifters, unscrupulous collectors, poets and thieves. Women were a complex yet important element of his life--particularly his wife, Annette, and his last mistress and model, Caroline--as was the intimate relationship he shared with his brother Diego, who was both Alberto's confidant and collaborator.
James Lord was personally acquainted with Giacometti and his entourage, and combines firsthand experience with a unique knowledge gathered during many years of observation and research. In this exceptional biography Lord unfolds the personal history of a man who managed to achieve a heroic destiny by remaining utterly true to himself and to his calling.
Giacometti: A Biography was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. James Lord has subsequently published three volumes of memoirs. In recognition of his contribution to French culture he has been made an officer of the Legion of Honour.
Леонард Дж. Аррингтон0.0 "Brigham Young was the supreme American paradox, not because he contained elements foreign to American soil but because he united them--the business genius of a Rockefeller with the spiritual sensitivities of an Emerson, the lusty enjoyments of the pleasures of good living with the tenderness of a Florence Nightingale. He was not merely an entrepreneur with a shared vision of America as the Promised Land; he was a prophet with visions of his own and he built beyond himself."
