Джина Беррио0.0 This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. For four decades Gina Berriault has been writing short stories praised for their elegance, compassion, range, and psychological intelligence. Writers from Raymond Carver to Andre Dubus have championed her work, which has been published in magazines from The Paris Review to Harpers Bazaar. Though she has received many fellowships and prizes, she has been too often overlooked.Suddenly, however, this has changed. In 1997, Berriault captured four of this countrys most prestigious awards: The National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, the book reviewers in her home state of California bestowed upon her the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Brigitte Frase, writing for Newsday, seemingly had a premonition when she wrote in December of 1996, Gina Berriault has been writing superbly for [forty] years. Its time she became an overnight sensation.Berriaults deep understanding of human emotions and human predicaments draws us into her stories--a librarian pursued by a homeless man searching for the meaning of his life, a daughter listening to her father as he speaks awkwardly to his heartbroken mistress, a son reintroducing himself to his parents after many years of absence. From her first lines (When Milo Jukovich was 19, he introduced himself to his father) to her last (She heard his breath take over for him and, in that secretive way the sleeper knows nothing about, carry on his life) her narrative sense and her eye for detail astound.She is a writer of uncommon range, her moods sometimes distanced and ironic, other times achingly raw and direct. She has said that she is indebted to the Russians--Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy,and Turgenev--for her literary inheritance, but she rejects every way of categorizing her writing. I find my sustenance in the outward, she says, in the wealth of humankind everywhere, and do not wish to be thought of as a Jewish writer or a feminist writer or as a Californian writer or as a leftwing writer or categorized by any interpretation. I find it liberating to roam wherever my heart and my mind guide me.
Дэниел Экст0.0 In this “outrageous, superb novel”(Philadelphia Inquirer), an obese, food-obsessed obituary writer witnesses a gangland slaying, which forces him to embark on a rollicking cross-country odyssey that will alter his eating habits, his weight, and, ultimately, his identity.
Кэтлин Кэмбор0.0 In a novel that “will grab your heart” (Library Journal), a mother’s absence continues to reverberate in the lives of the husband and two children she abandoned. A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Рон Хансен0.0 Colorado rancher Atticus Cody receives word that his wayward younger son, Scott, has committed suicide in Resurrection, Mexico. When Atticus travels south to recover Scott's body, he is puzzled by what he finds there and begins to suspect murder. Illuminating those often obscure chambers of the human heart, Atticus is the story of a father's steadfast and almost unfathomable love for his son, a mystery that Ron Hansen's fiction explores with a passion and intensity no reader will be able to resist.
Jamaica Kincaid3.0 Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel is the deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.
Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is “the black room of the world” that is Xuela’s barrenness and motherlessness.
The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry.
