Download or read book Queenie written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cheeky portrait of an old-fashioned young woman’s assimilation into the modern worldSet in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a “kept woman” in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted—yet insular and retrograde—household. After enrolling in college, Queenie confronts new understandings, both personal and political, and gradually becomes cognizant of the dated values imparted upon her. Bringing her trademark stylishness and a remarkable exuberance to Queenie, Hortense Calisher simultaneously pays homage to and updates the Victorian storytelling approach in capturing the intellectual and sexual breakthroughs of a contemporary young woman.
Download or read book False Entry written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVIn the vein of Eudora Welty and Charles Dickens, Hortense Calisher’s astounding first novel examines a young man’s detachment from the world—and his struggle to rejoin it /divDIV Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post–World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age ten when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again. He testifies against the Klan in the Deep South, joins the navy during World War II, experiences love, and eventually finds his way back to England as an entirely changed man./divDIV/div/div
Download or read book Tattoo for a Slave written by Hortense Calisher and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2004 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Calisher's family eventually migrated north to New York City, the echoes of their days as a slave-owning Jewish family in the South still resonate with this acclaimed author, who uncovers a part of history never before so strongly and tenderly revealed.
Download or read book The New Yorkers written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 807 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA sprawling, multicharacter masterpiece of guilt and the hope for redemption/divDIV/divDIV Opening in 1943 and spanning over a decade, The New Yorkers is Hortense Calisher’s most ambitious novel. Judge Simon Mannix, a well-educated upper-middle-class New Yorker, is faced with a terrible decision when his unfaithful wife is accidentally shot and killed by their twelve-year-old daughter. Mannix insists upon keeping the truth a secret, claiming that the death was a suicide, as he attempts to save his child from a life of psychological trauma. Shame accumulates in his consciousness, and Mannix finds himself obsessed with the nuances of guilt./div Calisher weaves a complex tapestry of closely observed human behaviors and emotions, accentuated by a collection of fragmented portraits of the lives that intersect with those of the judge and his daughter.
Download or read book In the Absence of Angels written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVThe debut short story collection that launched the career of one of the twentieth century’s most vivid writers, featuring the celebrated tale “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks”/divDIV/divDIV In this captivating collection of fifteen short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, Hortense Calisher’s lyrical prose captures the quotidian lives of individuals dealing with alienation, loneliness, and assimilation. Highly influenced by her own New York upbringing, Calisher brings an all-knowing and compassionate verve to these intimate stories./divDIV The opening piece, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” is an elegantly constructed tale of a man who becomes particularly introspective after dropping his loving but alcoholic mother off at a sanitarium. In “Heartburn,” Calisher deftly sketches a time and place through portraits of watering holes that resemble their own camaraderie-filled communities. The unforgettable title story captures the end of a love affair./div With her distinctive language and psychological clarity, Calisher meticulously builds truths through her characters and their understandings. /div
Download or read book Textures of Life written by Hortense Calisher and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVFinalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award–winning novelist Hortense Calisher/divDIV The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author’s best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker stories, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. Also included are “The Sound of Waiting,” one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length “The Summer Rebellion.”/div/div
Download or read book In the Cage written by Henry James and published by Hesperus Press. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this small masterpiece of unrequited love, Henry James, as in his greatest novels, depicts a moral consciousness torn between emotional impulses and the demands of society. Working in a post office in Mayfair, a young woman is exposed to the cryptic but alluring correspondence of the social elite, and in particular, to lines written by the dashing Captain Everard. As she memorizes the messages he telegraphs, she becomes increasingly attracted to the life described to her, fixated by scandal and gossip a world apart from her ordinary existence.
Download or read book The Novellas of Hortense Calisher written by Hortense Calisher and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Modern Library collection presents seven novellas that brilliantly showcase the range and depth of the talent of Hortense Calisher, a writer hailed by the Saturday Review as "among the most literate practitioners of modern American fiction, a stylist wholly committed to the exploitation of language." Featured is "Women Men Don't Talk About," a new story, published here for the first time. The novellas are characterized by their unfailing intelligence and by the technical sure-handedness and acuity of the writing. Each has a strong sense of place--New York City, the Hudson Valley, Saratoga Springs--and an eclectic cast of characters who inhabit regions where our most acute hopes, fears, and anxieties coexist. The respectable lawyer of "Tale for the Mirror" attempts to oust an unconventional Hindu healer from his community, only to wonder whether the doctor's trickery is any different from his own. In "The Railway Police," a journey by train occasions a social worker's sudden break with past pretenses and her kafkaesque rebirth as a vagabond. And in "Saratoga, Hot," a sharply observed tale set amid the fabled world of horse racing, a man and woman discover new strength in a love touched by tragedy. Included as well are "Extreme Magic," "The Man Who Spat Silver," and "The Last Trolley Ride." "Calisher hits at her targets at a point more vital than the usual marksman knows to exist," wrote novelist and critic Angus Wilson. And The New York Times Book Review commented, "Seen through her eyes the real world is not prosaic. Placed in lyrical, poetic spaces, it is thick and rich with implication." The Novellas of Hortense Calisher, an edition exclusive to the Modern Library, is amajor collection from one of America's finest literary voices. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
Download or read book The Bobby Soxer written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hortense Calisher’s revelatory novel of celebrity, small-town values, and a young woman’s coming of age Famous playwright Craig Towle has decided to return to his New Jersey hometown, a suburb of New York City. He arrives with his world-renowned reputation and a new wife who is half his age. It is the 1950s, and the new couple raises plenty of eyebrows—in particular, those of the narrator, an adolescent girl who is full of observations, but not judgments. At the center of this layered novel is the narrator’s unconventional family and their odd fixation on Towle, which goes beyond his mere celebrity. The secrets of their past and the potential involvement of Towle in the family’s lineage intertwine in a potentially devastating turn.
Download or read book The Fiction of Hortense Calisher written by Kathleen Snodgrass and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hortense Calisher is the author of eleven novels, six collections of stories or novellas, and two memoirs. The publication of her first book of short stories, In the Absence of Angels (1951), marked the debut of an important writer. For the past forty years her works have been consistently and widely reviewed. Calisher has long been celebrated (and censured) as a "writer's writer," a consummate stylist with an impressive range of subjects. Despite that range, however, Calisher's works possess a thematic coherence that has eluded critical notice. For more than forty years, she has spun out variations on the motif of rites of passage and of extradition. Her protagonists may yearn for stasis, for a firmly manageable reality, but finally emerge into a world where change is the only constant." "In The Fiction of Hortense Calisher, the first book-length study of Calisher's work, Kathleen Snodgrass demonstrates this theme's dominance. Following an introduction that provides biographical and critical background, she explores similarities in the structure of Calisher's works, grouping them together to illuminate both the general motif and its distinctive variations. In the first chapter, "Bridging the Gulf: The Autobiographical Stories," Snodgrass arranges Calisher's early stories into a biographically chronological order; a coherent narrative emerges that dramatizes Hester Elkin's rites of passage from childhood through adolescence to early adulthood. Hester Elkin is only the first of a succession of Calisher's protagonists to embrace life as an open-ended journey. In chapter 2, Snodgrass examines four Calisher novels that have in common tumultuous transitions from adolescence to adulthood. In Calisher, an essential part of that rite of passage is a "coming down from the heights" of theorizing and fantasy, into a willingness to grapple with mundane, adult realities. Chapter 3, "False Entries," focuses on two companion novels in which the central drama is the painful transition from stasis to movement." "Subsequent chapters focus on two very different types of movement: "Solo Flights" deals with characters sloughing off conventional lives like dead skins and setting off alone, while "Re-Entries" examines the opposite movement - here Calisher's characters re-enter what she has termed the "great enclosure of the norm." Later chapters discuss Calisher's two novels of space travel - works in which the primary voyage is psychic rather than physical - and works dealing with the voyaging life well into old age." "In her conclusion, "Calisher's 'Monologuing Eye,'" Snodgrass demonstrates the inseparability of style and theme in Calisher's works. Both stylistically and thematically, Calisher repudiates a predictably linear progression through life. If her style is, as some critics have remarked, "dense" and "elliptical," so, too, is her experience of the world. She leaves it to others to duplicate a received reality, choosing instead to take soundings on a world in flux."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book My Search for Warren Harding written by Robert Plunket and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece—an American classic that will “leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face” (Houston Post) When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket’s glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system”; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald, “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book.” More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of “great American comic fiction,” and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.” Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian—Harvard BA, Columbia PhD—with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, “the shallowest President in history.” After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president’s bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 1981 written by Walter Abish and published by Penguin (Non-Classics). This book was released on 1982 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2014 written by Jennifer Egan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Download or read book Textures of Life written by Hortense Calisher and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study in motives, conflicts, ambitions, and fears as idealistic young newlyweds face unanticipated realities Hortense Calisher’s second novel is a multigenerational story of art, family, and marriage. Opening with Liz and David’s wedding and chronicling the first four years of their life together, Calisher follows the couple through their evolution into erudite, antimaterialist artists. They move into a sparse downtown Manhattan loft, prideful of their rebellious choice to lead lives unfettered by possessions. As time passes, they realize that their unbridled optimism is slowly being abraded by the disappointments of reality. With the ambiguously pleasant news that Elizabeth’s mother and David’s father, both widowed, are finding new love together, Calisher further explores the couple’s interplay and draws piercing parallels between the idealism of youth and the sagacity of old age. Textures of Life explores the nature of relationships and the shifts—both minute and seismic—that affect the power dynamics as Liz and David constantly redefine their roles and opinions in order to sustain their relationship.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Modern Women s Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The inadequate acknowledgement of women short story writers in standard anthologies is a cause for wonder or affront. How else, indeed, can you view it, given the riches overlooked?" So states editor Patricia Craig in her introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, a rich, wide-ranging collection that, at last, redresses this historical imbalance by bringing together forty examples of the very best women's stories--from established authors such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Mansfield, to such modern masters as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Here readers will find humor, passion, eccentricity, forcefulness, elan, intellectual vigor, subversion--indeed every shading of tone and mood, from ironic detachment to full-blooded engagement. Each writer has her own, perfectly realized angle of vision, whether it's the zestfulness of Angela Carter, the breathtaking evocations of Willa Cather, the quirkiness of Grace Paley, or the pungency of Flannery O'Connor. Breaking with tradition, editor Patricia Craig offers few stories about traditional "women's" topics. Instead, the entries in this collection range from an unforgettable tale of racism in South Africa to explorations of adultery, immigration, the importance of cultural identity, and the rootlessness of American cities. Craig also includes some provocative offerings from outside the mainstream of twentieth century fiction--a ghost story by Edith Wharton, a delightful fairy tale, and several engaging historical pieces. Eloquent and captivating, The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories offers a dazzling assortment of classic stories and overlooked gems that will amuse, intrigue, and challenge every lover of fine fiction.
Download or read book Abducted by Circumstance written by David Madden and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Abducted by Circumstance, David Madden offers his readers a unique experience simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Carol Seaborg makes a risky visit in zero weather to a lighthouse near her house in The Thousand Islands of New York on the Canadian border. A self-confident, attractive woman of about 55 suddenly appears on the observation deck looking out over frozen Lake Ontario. Carol admires the woman as her ideal. Suddenly, the woman disappears, apparently abducted by a serial rapist and killer, stimulating in Carol an immediate empathy that, enhanced by the power of her imagination, is so great as to make her unique. Carol projects her own emotions, imagination, and intellect into Glenda's experience. To render that empathy and imagination, Madden channels everything that the people around her say and do through Carol's perceptions so intimately that he shifts frequently and without transition into her thoughts, which focus mostly on the abducted woman, whose name newscasters reveal is Glenda Hamilton. As Carol imagines Glenda gradually coping with her abductor, she speaks directly, sometimes out loud, to her, encouraging her, advising her, expressing fear for her. If Carol's external experiences are passive almost to paralysis, her memories reveal that her life has been full of more venturesome relationships and events (she once rode across Greece alone on a bicycle) than most wives and mothers in their late thirties have. Carol's emotions and imagination are highly charged and exquisitely presented. The circumstances and relationships of her past and present predispose Carol to empathize with Glenda. Carol's own life among a crude, remote second husband, a somewhat estranged adolescent son, a bright five-year-old daughter, a father who is a rather cold philosophy teacher, and the strong spiritual presence of her mother who committed suicide, is simple and routine. The events involving Glenda's disappearance take place during the week before Carol's second surgery for breast cancer. Gradually, as she takes late night drives with her little girl, visits her ex-boyfriend's father in a nursing home, drives by her ex-lover's house and business, and visits the campus where her father is a prominent teacher, the reader realizes, some pages before Carol herself does, that she has been abducted by the circumstances of her life. Although it is grounded in the realistic detail of everyday life, Abducted by Circumstance is unique in conception, style, and characterization. Madden immerses the reader in an extraordinarily rich and unforgettable psychological experience. Thoroughly absorbing from start to finish--Abducted by Circumstance explores Carol's troubled psyche with the rare precision and insight that have long distinguished David Madden's fiction.
