John Banville s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of...
John Banville s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murd...
One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville s masterful new novel, is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie. Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls Miss Nemesis. They are to meet in Turin, a city best known for its enigmatic shroud. Is her purpose to...
One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville s ma...
In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel among...
In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman ...
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancee is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the...
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether...
Writing was the central passion of Emerson s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in The Poet, The American Scholar, Nature, Goethe, and Persian Poetry, less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage s energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work today. Emerson advised that the way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent....
Writing was the central passion of Emerson s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in The Poet, The American Scholar, Nature...
Oliver Otway Orme a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who has never been caught . . . until now. Unfortunately, the purloined possession in question is the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend. Fearing the consequences, Olly has fled not only from his mistress, his home, and his wife, but from the very impulse to paint, and from his own demons. He sequesters himself in the house where he was born, and thus, he sets about trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did. A witty and...
Oliver Otway Orme a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who has never been caught . ....
Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master." (Harold Bloom) As John Banville writes in his introduction to THE LOVE OBJECT, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." Illustrating a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart, the thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are...
Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master." (Harold Bloom) As Joh...
