Barth's richest, most joyous novel yet describes a couple's journey on the Chesapeake Bay, a cruise that overflows with stories--of past lives and love, entanglements with the CIA and toxic waste, and inventive brushes with Don Quixote, Odysseus and Scheherazade.
"Tell me a story!" Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore orders her husband Peter Sagamore -- and so lets loose a flood of tales that floats them both past encounteres with their own lives and loves, entanglements with the CIA and toxic waste, and fantastically inventive brushes with some of the greatest characters of all time, including updated versions of Don Quixote, Odysseus, and Scheherazade.
From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie’s Choice: three novellas of a young writer’s journey to adulthood. In Love Day, twenty-year-old Paul Whitehurst is a Marine lieutenant during World War II, waiting to land on Okinawa, wrestling with anxiety and memories of his boyhood in Virginia. In Shadrach, ten-year-old Paul witnesses his neighbors as they welcome a guest: a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who has walked nine hundred miles from Alabama so that he may die on the land of his childhood owner. And in A Tidewater Morning, Paul is thirteen and struggling to deal with his mother’s impending death from cancer. Together in one volume, each of these affecting semiautobiographical novellas from the author of such literary classics as the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the memoir Darkness Visible, weaves together the transformative experiences of Whitehurst’s early life with William Styron’s signature deep historical insight, underscoring how the significance of the past informs the present. As the Los Angeles Times notes, it is “one of Styron’s finest works. . . . The beauty and humanity of the Southern tradition are evoked vividly.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.
'Intrigue' examines the tradition of the spy narrative in the 20th century, setting the historical contexts for the main themes of the genre, such as the Cambridge spy ring & the Profumo Affair. Hepburn offers a systematic theory of the conventions & attractions of espionage fiction.
These are the adventures of Wib and Fred Field: the wonderful barefoot days of planning and building, sailing and rowing, on the banks of the Squamscott, in southern New Hampshire. The author heard tales from her father, and when her own sons began to beg for stories, she recalled some of the old favorites.
This volume deals with the inherent relation between literary genres and cultural memory. Indeed, generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge (a sort of ‘encyclopaedia' or 'museum' of stocked culture) and have played and still play an important role in absorbing and activating that memory. The contributors have focused on some specific memory-linked genres that prove especially relevant in remembering and transforming past experiences, i.e. the (post)modern historical novel and various forms of (post)modern autobiographical writing. They deal with such renowned authors as Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, Antonio Tabucchi, John Barth, Julian Barnes, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Georges Perec and Marguerite Yourcenar. The volume, thus, constitutes an attractive and representative sample of (post)modern forms of rewriting and problematizing individual and collective pasts.