JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE -- who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece wrote for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly ...
Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал)The October Country (Октябрьская страна)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)
Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch, is set in 1940s London, during and after the Second World War, and is an innovative departure from her previous three lesbian Victorian historical fictions. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) depend on melodramatic scenes of excess and chicanery, with occasional references to postmodern thinking. In comparison, The Night Watch is more constrained in its telling of love stories and secrets. Its tone echoes the view we have, in the 21st century, of rationed wartime Britain and the use of the more distant third-person, rather than the confiding first-person, signals a further ...
An elderly man reads to an elderly woman every day from a yellowed notebook that he carries around with him. He hopes that this notebook, which contains the memories of his love and life, will jog her memory, but it is not to be. Yet, he tries each day and does not give up because within its pages tells the story of Noah Taylor Calhoun, a young Southerner, and his great passion and love for Allison Nelson.Noah, who has just graduated from high school, and Allie, who is a junior, meet in the summer of 1932 and fall ...
Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives!I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, ...
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyptic England, and feature a fascinating array of characters: aging jazzmen, avalanche researchers, a South African wild child, and a mute actor in silent films. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.
Дорис Лессинг (родилась в 1919 году) — прогрессивная английская писательница, автор двух романов и сборника новелл. Детство и юность провела в Южной Родезии (Юго-Восточная Африка). После окончания колледжа работала на телефонной станции, в конторах и пр. В 1950 году вышел первый роман Д. Лессинг — «Поющая трава», привлёкший внимание к молодой писательнице. Одна из основных тем её творчества — жизнь и быт негритянского населения Южной Родезии, угнетаемого белыми колонизаторами. В настоящее время Д. Лессинг живёт в Англии, участвует в движении сторонников мира, сотрудничает в прогрессивных изданиях. В прошлом году [1952] вместе с группой английских писателей побывала в Советском Союзе. (Из Предуведомления к публикации рассказа "Старый вождь Мшланга" в журнале "Новый мир".)
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five--the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books--has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative--dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality--affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.
"Such beautiful writing." – Jodi PicoultThe wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother – her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother – tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest ...
