Download or read book Morte D Urban written by J.F. Powers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2000-05-31 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction. The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God's word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover. First published in 1962, Morte D'Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.

Download or read book Morte d Urban written by J.F. Powers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The humorous 1963 National Book Award winning novel of a charming aging priest and his morally ambiguous exploits when banished to a Minnesota retreat house The hero of J.F. Powers’s comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God’s word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover. First published in 1962, Morte D’Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.

Download or read book The Stories of J F Powers written by J.F. Powers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by Frank O’Connor as one of “the greatest living storytellers,” J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest. Powers’s thoroughly human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption. These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life.

Download or read book Wheat That Springeth Green written by J.F. Powers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wheat That Springeth Green, J. F. Powers’s beautifully realized final work, is a comic foray into the commercialized wilderness of modern American life. Its hero, Joe Hackett, is a high school track star who sets out to be a saint. But seminary life and priestly apprenticeship soon damp his ardor, and by the time he has been given a parish of his own he has traded in his hair shirt for the consolations of baseball and beer. Meanwhile Joe’s higher-ups are pressing for an increase in profits from the collection plate, suburban Inglenook’s biggest business wants to launch its new line of missiles with a blessing, and not all that far away, in Vietnam, a war is going on. Joe wants to duck and cover, but in the end, almost in spite of himself, he is condemned to do something right. J. F. Powers was a virtuoso of the American language with a perfect ear for the telling clich? and an unfailing eye for the kitsch that clutters up our lives. This funny and very moving novel about the making and remaking of a priest is one of his finest achievements.

Download or read book Suitable Accommodations written by J. F. Powers and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wry, moving collection of letters from the late J. F. Powers, "a comic writer of genius" (Mary Gordon) Best known for his 1963 National Book Award–winning novel, Morte D'Urban, and as a master of the short story, J. F. Powers drew praise from Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, among others. Though Powers's fiction dwelt chiefly on the lives of Catholic priests, he long planned to write a novel of family life, a feat he never accomplished. He did, however, write thousands of letters, which, selected here by his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, become an intimate version of that novel, dynamic with plot and character. They show a dedicated artist, passionate lover, reluctant family man, pained aesthete, sports fan, and appreciative friend. At times wrenching and sad, at others ironic and exuberantly funny, Suitable Accommodations is the story of a man at odds with the world and, despite his faith, with his church. Beginning in prison, where Powers spent more than a year as a conscientious objector, the letters move on to his courtship, marriage, comically unsuccessful attempt to live in the woods, life in the Midwest and in Ireland, an unorthodox view of the Catholic Church, and an increasingly bizarre search for "suitable accommodations," which included three full-scale emigrations to Ireland. Here, too, are encounters with such diverse people as Thomas Merton, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Alfred Kinsey. An NPR Best Book of 2013

Download or read book Morte D Urban written by James Farl Powers and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Prince of Darkness and Other Stories written by James Farl Powers and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Sunne In Splendour written by Sharon Kay Penman and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic, magnificent bestselling novel about Richard III, now in a special thirtieth anniversary edition with a new preface by the author In this triumphant combination of scholarship and storytelling, Sharon Kay Penman redeems Richard III—vilified as the bitter, twisted, scheming hunchback who murdered his nephews, the princes in the Tower—from his maligned place in history. Born into the treacherous courts of fifteenth-century England, in the midst of what history has called The War of the Roses, Richard was raised in the shadow of his charismatic brother, King Edward IV. Loyal to his friends and passionately in love with the one woman who was denied him, Richard emerges as a gifted man far more sinned against than sinning. With revisions throughout and a new author's preface discussing the astonishing discovery of Richard's remains five centuries after his death, Sharon Kay Penman's brilliant classic is more powerful and glorious than ever.

Download or read book The Last Hurrah Etc written by Edwin Greene O'CONNOR and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mean Streets written by Jim Butcher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four bestselling fantasy authors present a collection of novellas about dark nights, cruel cities, and paranormal P.I.s—featuring Harry Dresden, John Taylor, Harper Blaine, and Remy Chandler. #1 New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher delivers a story in which Harry Dresden—Chicago's only professional wizard—tries to protect a friend from danger and ends up becoming a target himself... John Taylor is the best PI in the secret heart of London known as The Nightside. He can find anything. But locating the lost memory of a desperate woman may be his undoing in a thrilling noir tale from New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green... National bestselling author Kat Richardson’s Greywalker finds herself in too deep when a job in Mexico goes awry, and Harper Blaine is enmeshed in a tangle of dark family secrets and revenge from beyond the grave... An ancient being that lived among humanity for centuries is dead, and fallen angel-turned-Boston detective Remy Chandler has been hired to find out who—or what—murdered him in a whodunit by national bestselling author Thomas E. Sniegoski...

Download or read book Elbow Room written by James Alan McPherson and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1986-10-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful collection of short stories that explores blacks and whites today, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define. Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through the self-deception of a failed preacher, challenges the audacity of a killer or explodes the jealousy of two lovers, James Alan McPherson has created an array of haunting images and memorable characters in an unsurpassed collection of honest, masterful fiction.

Download or read book Saint City Sinners written by Lilith Saintcrow and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saint City has always been Dante Valentine's home. It's where she grew up, it's where her dead are buried, and it's where she learned to hunt. Now, one call from an old friend will bring her back to investigate a murder too close to home for anyone's comfort. But the one person she trusted has just betrayed her. Sometimes revenge is best served demon-hot. . .

Download or read book The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton written by Thomas Merton and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1985 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses Blake, Joyce, Pasternak, Faulkner, Styron, O'Connor, Camus, symbolism, creativity, alienation, contemplation, and freedom.

Download or read book Look how the Fish Live written by James Farl Powers and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1988 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Year of the French written by Thomas Flanagan and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2004-10-31 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack. Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel. Named the most distinguished work of fiction in 1979 by the National Book Critics' Circle.

Download or read book The Judges of the Secret Court written by David Stacton and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Stacton’s The Judges of The Secret Court is a long-lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War. Stacton’s gripping and atmospheric story revolves around the brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, members of a famous theatrical family. Edwin is a great actor, himself a Hamlet-like character whose performance as Hamlet will make him an international sensation. Wilkes is a blustering mediocrity on stage who is determined, however, to be an actor in history, and whose assassination of Abraham Lincoln will change America. Stacton’s novel about how the roles we play become, for better or for worse, the lives we lead, takes us back to the day of the assassination, immersing us in the farrago of bombast that fills Wilkes’s head while following his footsteps up to the fatal encounter at Ford’s Theatre. The political maneuvering around Lincoln’s deathbed and Wilkes’s desperate flight and ignominious capture then set the stage for a political show trial that will condemn not only the guilty but the—at least relatively—innocent. For as Edwin Booth broods helplessly many years later, and as Lincoln, whose tragic death and wisdom overshadow this tale, also knew, “We are all accessories before or after some fact. . . . We are all guilty of being ourselves.”

Download or read book Godric written by Frederick Buechner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1983-11-02 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Buechner's Godric "retells the life of Godric of Finchale, a twelfth-century English holy man whose projects late in life included that of purifying his moral ambition of pride...Sin, spiritual yearning, rebirth, fierce asceticism--these hagiographic staples aren't easy to revitalize but Frederick Buechner goes at the task with intelligent intensity and a fine readiness to invent what history doesn't supply. He contrives a style of speech for his narrator--Godric himself--that's brisk and tough-sinewed...He avoids metaphysical fiddle, embedding his narrative in domestic reality--familiar affection, responsibilities, disasters...All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish...Frederick Buechner is a very good writer indeed." -- Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "From the book's opening sentence...and sensible reader will be caught in Godric's grip...Godric glimmers brightly." -- Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek "Godric is a memorable book...a marvelous gem of a book...destined to become a classic of its kind." -- Michael Heskett, Houston Chronicle "In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Frederick Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality. Godric is a living battleground where God fights it out with the world, the Flesh, and the Devil." -- London Times Literary Supplement "Wityh a poet's sensibly and a high reverent fancy, Frederick Buechner paints a memorable portrait." -- Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal