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.
William Gaddis4.4 This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad -- and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).
Хью Ниссенсон0.0 Finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award
"This small novel works like a laser beam, penetrating the American experience with searing and concentrated intensity."—Los Angeles Times
"The Tree of Life is one of the most powerful, original, and disturbing books that I have read in a long time. Hugh Nissenson has caught the voice of the old-time diary keeper just exactly. It's uncanny, marvelous, so direct and deceptively simple that you know what pains he has taken.The book is a work of art and no one who reads it will ever forget it."—David McCullough
"It is a tale more moving and haunting than one thinks it can possibly be."—Village Voice
The year is 1811. Having suffered a loss of faith, Thomas Keene, Congregational minister from New England, abandons the East and moves to Richland County on the Ohio frontier. The Tree of Life is Keene's journal: stories and jottings appear alongside accounting entries and poems, coarse jokes and sermons, woodcuts and maps. In this "Waste Book," Keene conveys his longing for a young widow, his fascination with John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), and his resolve in the face of the growing enmity between his fellow settlers and the Delaware Indians. The Tree of Life reveals a man of intellect and passion as he confronts the raw country.
"The juxtaposition of horror and information perfectly captures the genius of this imagined diary…Scarcely a word is wasted. Hardly an aspect of the struggle to found a new civilization remains untouched. The Tree of Life dramatizes, sometimes with almost unbearable intensity, the American dream and its attendant nightmare."—Time Magazine
"[The Tree of Life] confronts us where our deepest and most disturbing fantasies intersect with our sense of history…Given the richness of its texture and the strength of whichever of its threads one pursues, one can imagine that its force will grow and take an ever tighter grip on our understanding of the American past. It is a book that plants deep seeds."—New York Times
"A beautifully paced book…[it] allows the shocks and resonances to gather slowly, the way they do in life when you are taking everything in, but cannot yet allow yourself to admit how much you've been affected…In thrall to the powers Mr. Nissenson has invoked and wielded with such fearful symmetry—the powers of documentation and of vision—we can only read on."—Margo Jefferson, from her new Introduction
Hugh Nissenson (1933–2013) was born in New York City. After graduating from Swarthmore College, he published his first short story in Harper's Magazine in 1958. He taught writing at Yale, Barnard, and Auburn Theological Seminary, and was the author of a memoir, three collections of short stories and journals, and many novels.
Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek; her reviews and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Grand Street, Vogue, Harper's and many other publications.
Хелен Норрис0.0 A lonely widower rents a woman to keep him company over the holidays. The young wife of a considerably older man steps off their train for just a moment and never returns. A woman and her withdrawn grandchild try to bridge the generations and loneliness keeping them apart. In these tales and others in "The Christmas Wife," Helen Norris celebrates the heart's triumph over the tragic losses and nameless longings of our common existence.
Grace Paley0.0 This reissue of Grace Paley's classic collection―a finalist for the National Book Award―demonstrates her rich use of language as well as her extraordinary insight into and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again. Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived.
The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
