Download or read book Little Black Book of Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable collection of fairy tales for grownups—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. • “A delight.... provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered.... [She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” —The New York Times Book Review Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for adults. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form. Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

Download or read book The Matisse Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three delightful stories inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and “a writer of dazzling inventiveness" (Time). "[An] exquisite triptych.... Richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people." —People These stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling—about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority. "Full of delight and humor.... The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion." —San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Still Life written by A.S. Byatt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to 'The Virgin in the Garden, ' in the 1950s, Stephanie Potter, now married to a clergyman, is conflicted about her domestic life and her strivings for intellectual fulfillment; her brilliant sister Frederica eagerly embarks on her academic (and sexual) education at Cambridge University; and their troubled brother Marcus painfully tries to find friendship and love.

Download or read book Sugar and Other Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected in a single volume for the first time—an unforgettable book of short stories from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession that explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it. In this book of short fictions, A.S. Byatt compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder. "Byatt's stories display all her talents as a novelist, but spiced with an additional friskiness." —Evening Standard

Download or read book Babel Tower written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-18 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession presents an extraordinary story set against the backdrop of the 1960s—a turbulent decade of clashing politics, passionate ideals, and shifting sexual roles. At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure—the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time. We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the day seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. Peopled with weird and colorful characters, charted with brilliant, imaginative sympathy, Babel Tower is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Download or read book The Game written by Les Logan and published by Bantam Books. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bitter because of the accident that left her confined to a wheelchair, Julie spends hours playing with her ouija board, until she inadvertently contacts a demon.

Download or read book Medusa s Ankles written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary—even beyond the gloss of the fantastical—to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

Download or read book Unruly Times written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it. With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A. S. Byatt brings alive this tumultuous period and shows a deep understanding of the effects upon the minds of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their contemporaries - de Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Byron and Keats.

Download or read book A Whistling Woman written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession delivers a brilliant and thought-provoking novel about the 1960s and how the psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism of the times affected ordinary lives. “Rich, acerbic, wise.... [Byatt] tackles nothing less than what it means to be human.” —Vogue Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, in her native Yorkshire where her lover is involved in academic research, the university is planning a prestigious conference on body and mind, and a group of students and agitators is establishing an “anti-university.” And nearby a therapeutic community is beginning to take the shape of a religious cult under the influence of its charismatic religious leader. A Whistling Woman portrays the antic, thrilling, and dangerous period of the late ‘60s as seen through the eyes of a woman whose life is forever changed by her times.

Download or read book Home for Erring and Outcast Girls written by Julie Kibler and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An emotionally raw and resonant story of love, loss, and the enduring power of friendship, following the lives of two young women connected by a home for “fallen girls,” and inspired by historical events. “Home for Erring and Outcast Girls deftly reimagines the wounded women who came seeking a second chance and a sustaining hope.”—Lisa Wingate, author of Before We Were Yours In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection of Erring Girls is an unprecedented beacon of hope for young women consigned to the dangerous poverty of the streets by birth, circumstance, or personal tragedy. Built in 1903 on the dusty outskirts of Arlington, a remote dot between Dallas and Fort Worth’s red-light districts, the progressive home bucks public opinion by offering faith, training, and rehabilitation to prostitutes, addicts, unwed mothers, and “ruined” girls without forcibly separating mothers from children. When Lizzie Bates and Mattie McBride meet there—one sick and abused, but desperately clinging to her young daughter, the other jilted by the beau who fathered her ailing son—they form a friendship that will see them through unbearable loss, heartbreak, difficult choices, and ultimately, diverging paths. A century later, Cate Sutton, a reclusive university librarian, uncovers the hidden histories of the two troubled women as she stumbles upon the cemetery on the home’s former grounds and begins to comb through its archives in her library. Pulled by an indescribable connection, what Cate discovers about their stories leads her to confront her own heartbreaking past, and to reclaim the life she thought she'd let go forever. With great pathos and powerful emotional resonance, Home for Erring and Outcast Girls explores the dark roads that lead us to ruin, and the paths we take to return to ourselves.

Download or read book The Sin Warriors written by Julian E. Farris and published by Lethe Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years ago, three hundred teachers and students in Florida vanished. No storm troopers. No mass graves. Who were they? Just wasted lives from blackmail, coercion, entrapment-tactics of state senator Charlie Johns and his covert investigations of homosexuals in Florida's universities. The Sin Warriors is a novel inspired by those actual events. David Ashton has struggled for self-acceptance and identity his entire life. David's estrangement from a dysfunctional family childhood, his sexual awakening and bonding with his gay professor places them in the crosshairs of state senator Billy Sloat, an ambitious, country politician obsessed with ridding the university of subversives-homosexuals, blacks, alleged communists-on the heels of the McCarthy hearings during the mid-fifties. But who is Sloat actually, and where does his hatred and contempt come from? From a backwoods childhood in North Florida to his reign as a powerful senator, Sloat intends to destroy the new life David has built for himself in college, and questions are raised: What is family? Whom should we love? What price do we pay to defend our country and our integrity? Which is more enduring-fear or love? These themes provide counterpoint to corrupt politicians and their abuse of power to further their own prejudices and limited understanding of what it is to be human.

Download or read book Degrees of Freedom written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1965, A.S. Byatt's Degrees of Freedom examined the first eight novels of Iris Murdoch, identifying freedom as a central theme in all of them, and looking at Murdoch's interest in the relations between art and goodness, master and slave, and the novel of character in the nineteenth century sense. Drawing on Iris Murdoch's own critical and philosphical writing, A.S. Byatt discussed her interest in the thought of Sartre, Plato, Freud and Simone Weil, and related this to the form of the novels themselves. This edition of Degrees of Freedom has an added dossier of later essays and reviews of Iris Murdoch's work by A.S Byatt, taking us up to the publication of The Book and the Brotherhood in 1987. It also includes a substantial pamplet written for the British Council which follows Murdoch's fiction as far as The Good Apprentice.

Download or read book The Short Story A Very Short Introduction written by Andrew Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What defines a modern short story is much more than a question of length. Despite the efforts of early pioneers like Edgar Allan Poe, the genre was originally synonymous with the anecdote or tale and seen more as entertainment than art. However it has become far more than that, and this Very Short Introduction considers afresh the form's ongoing innovations in plot construction, capacity for psychological insight, and ability to offer intensely concentrated perceptions. This book charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers, largely in the United States and Great Britain. For much of the nineteenth century, tales were written for the press, and the form's history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. From the later nineteenth century, the short story earned a reputation for its skillful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. After the First World War it found outlets in high-brow publications, and single-author collections, as well as anthologies, were regularly published. Exploring the form's techniques and themes, Andrew Kahn considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout he draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work, with close analysis of classic and lesser-known stories by American, Canadian, Irish, Australian, Russian, and French masters such as James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Taylor, William Trevor, Helen Garner, Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant. Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Jefferson s Sons written by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This story of Thomas Jefferson's children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, tells a darker piece of America's history from an often unseen perspective-that of three of Jefferson's slaves-including two of his own children. As each child grows up and tells his story, the contradiction between slavery and freedom becomes starker, calliing into question the real meaning of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This poignant story sheds light on what life was like as one of Jefferson's invisible offspring.

Download or read book The Belly of Paris written by Émile Zola and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-27 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, first published in 1873. It is a novel of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The book was originally translated into English by Henry Vizetelly and published in 1888 under the title Fat and Thin. After Vizetelly's imprisonment for obscene libel the novel was one of those revised and expurgated by his son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart. She has become prosperous, and with prosperity her selfishness has increased. Her brother-in-law Florent had escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lived for a short time in her house, but she became tired of his presence and ultimately denounced him to the police. Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

Download or read book I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl written by Kelle Groom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of addiction and grief, forgiveness, and survival from a poet who recovers from alcoholism only after she sees her child die of leukemia.

Download or read book Portraits In Fiction written by A S Byatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.