Download or read book Christina Stead and the Matter of America written by Fiona Morrison and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation of Stead's American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her 'restlessly experimental' style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, America provoked Stead to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead's time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead's American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century, and that Stead's account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.
Download or read book Christina Stead and the Matter of America written by Fiona Morrison and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality. In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.
Download or read book The Man Who Loved Children written by Christina Stead and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”
Download or read book For Love Alone written by Christina Stead and published by The Miegunyah Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In the harbour city's steamy, fecund heat, the air is thick with thwarted longing, the people on the tram smell like foxes, and the girls with their glossy hair talk of hope chests and fight down the dread of being left on the shelf.' from the Introduction by Drusilla Modjeska Superbly evoking life in Sydney and London in the 1930s, For Love Alone is the story of the intelligent and determined Teresa Hawkins, who believes in passionate love and yearns to experience it. She focuses her energy on Jonathan Crow, an unlikeable and arrogant man whom she follows to London after four long years of working in a factory and living at home with her loveless family. Reunited with Crow in London, she begins to realise that perhaps he is not as worthy of her affections as originally thought.
Download or read book Christina Stead written by Hazel Rowley and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography is of Christina Stead, born in Australia in 1902, and who sailed to England at age twenty-six, and not returning to Australia until she was 72. This intellectually rigorous and riveting tells of Stead's life, a life that was stormy, eccentric and brave.
Download or read book Eliza Hamilton Dunlop written by Katie Hansord and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796–1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem “The Aboriginal Mother,” written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies. This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.
Download or read book I m Dying Laughing written by Christina Stead and published by Owl Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Little Tea a Little Chat written by Christina Stead and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match: Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he cannot best. A sardonic commentary on sexual relations and war as potent as when it was first published in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat holds up a mirror to the corruption and cravenness of our late-capitalist moment. Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century. ‘[Christina Stead] is really marvellous.’ Saul Bellow ‘A sprawling character study...Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.’ Kirkus reviews, starred review
Download or read book Speculative Time written by Paul Crosthwaite and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.
Download or read book Liar Spy written by Rebecca Stead and published by Wendy Lamb Books. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller from the author of the Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me: a story about spies, games, and friendship. The first day Georges (the S is silent) moves into a new Brooklyn apartment, he sees a sign taped to a door in the basement: SPY CLUB MEETING—TODAY! That’s how he meets his twelve-year-old neighbor Safer. He and Georges quickly become allies—and fellow spies. Their assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer’s requests become more and more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend? “Will touch the hearts of kids and adults alike.” —NPR Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more!
Download or read book The Life to Come written by Michelle De Kretser and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisted for the Stella Prize Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award “For a novel concerned with dislocation, there's a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser's observations are so spot on, you'll forgive her even as you cringe.”—Amelia Lester, New York Times Book Review Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict. Pippa is a writer who longs for success and eventually comes to fear that she “missed everything important.” Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Sri Lankan Christabel endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, and sank back,” while she neglects the love close at hand. The stand–alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.
Download or read book The Foreign Student written by Susan Choi and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young Korean man scarred by war finds unlikely love in the American South in the National Book Award–winning author’s acclaimed debut novel. Tennessee, 1955. When Chuck Ahn arrives in Sewanee to begin his studies at the University of the South, he is shy and speaks English haltingly. On the subject of his earlier life in Korea, he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine Monroe, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening and a young man’s nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction. “An auspicious debut.” —The New Yorker
Download or read book The Puzzleheaded Girl written by Christina Stead and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The puzzleheaded girl of the title novella, Honor Lawrence, is a young New York filing clerk whose motives her mentor, Augustus Debrett, finds impossible to understand. Her obvious poverty is so embarrassing for the New England elite of her acquaintance that they prefer to imagine scandal in its place. Refusing to accept promotion, but asking, all the same, for help, Honor becomes a spectral figure in Debrett's life, leaving puzzlement and disquiet in her wake. "The Puzzleheaded Girl" (first published in 1968) is a collection of four novellas: "The Puzzleheaded Girl," "The Dianas," "The Rightangled Creek" and "Girl from the Beach."
Download or read book Trouble written by Kate Jennings and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put women s lib on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time. Trouble collects Jennings s best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate s frankness. Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts seismic and subtle, personal and political that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise shocking with the shock of recognition as the day it was written.
Download or read book The Salzburg Tales written by Christina Stead and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of visitors to the Salzburg Festival, brought together by chance, decides to mark time by telling tales. Their fantasies, legends, tragedies, jokes and parodies come together as The Salzburg Tales. Dazzling in their richness and vitality, the tales are grounded in Christina Stead's belief that 'the story is magical . what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one'. Originally published eighty years ago, these are thoroughly modern stories that invite comparison with Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Salzburg Tales are published here with a new introduction by Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead.
Download or read book Middlebrow Modernism written by Melinda J. Cooper and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976. Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism. Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.
Download or read book Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story written by D. T. Max and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.
