You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald
Christopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare’s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald’s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimis...
“A delectable comedy of manners” set in 1950s Florence, by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Bookshop (The Boston Globe). It’s 1955, and Italy is still struggling a decade after the end of World War II. So are the Ridolfis, a Florentine family of long and fading noble lineage. Like their decrepit villa, they’ve seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality—however impulsive and perilously naïve. Chiara has set her heart and her future on Salvatore Rossi, a brilliant, penniless young doctor and bull-headed son of a Communist, who has erased both politics and romance from his list of priorities. With her plans stymied, Chiara calls on her re...
Christopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare’s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald’s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimis...
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer – full of wit, feeling and illumination.
With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Concise, comic, biting, and mischievous, they are vintage Fitzgerald. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power--by wealth, status, or class--and those who, deceptively, are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.
None
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie.
In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside-down.
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography Penelope Fitzgerald, one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century, was a great English writer whose career didn’t begin until she was nearly sixty. Her life was marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. Her exquisite novels—short, spare masterpieces—would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature: the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee gives us this remarkable writer’s story.