Books by A. S. Byatt
Born: 1936A. S. Byatt Biography & Notes
Antonia Susan Byatt (born August 24, 1936, Sheffield, England) has been hailed by some as one of the greatest postmodern novelists in Britain. She is usually known as A. S. Byatt.
She was educated at the University of Cambridge, before teaching at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design. Her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, is also a successful novelist, and the rivalry between the two is legendary.
Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, including Possession which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990.
More recently, A. S. Byatt caused controversy by suggesting that the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books is because they are "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." In her editorial column in the New York Times newspaper, she scathingly attacked adult readers of the series as uncultured, claiming that "they don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had."
After the column appeared in the newspaper, her editorial was described by Salon.com contributing writer Charles Taylor as "upfront in its snobbishness." He also suggested that Byatt's claims may be due to jealousy towards Rowling's commercial success, though given her vigorous defence of the novels of Terry Pratchett against mid-brow pundits this criticism seems particularly ill-founded.
Also well-known for her short stories, Byatt is allegedly influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, as she merges realism and naturalism with the fantasies of Victorian literature. Byatt prefers to offer fantasy not as an escape, but as an alternative to, everyday life, creating what is often termed a "hybrid genre", a combination of experimental and realistic work.
Two of her works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession and Angels & Insects.
She was educated at the University of Cambridge, before teaching at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design. Her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, is also a successful novelist, and the rivalry between the two is legendary.
Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, including Possession which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990.
More recently, A. S. Byatt caused controversy by suggesting that the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books is because they are "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." In her editorial column in the New York Times newspaper, she scathingly attacked adult readers of the series as uncultured, claiming that "they don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had."
After the column appeared in the newspaper, her editorial was described by Salon.com contributing writer Charles Taylor as "upfront in its snobbishness." He also suggested that Byatt's claims may be due to jealousy towards Rowling's commercial success, though given her vigorous defence of the novels of Terry Pratchett against mid-brow pundits this criticism seems particularly ill-founded.
Also well-known for her short stories, Byatt is allegedly influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, as she merges realism and naturalism with the fantasies of Victorian literature. Byatt prefers to offer fantasy not as an escape, but as an alternative to, everyday life, creating what is often termed a "hybrid genre", a combination of experimental and realistic work.
Two of her works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession and Angels & Insects.
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Angels and Insects Two Novellas by A. S. Byatt ( 1994)
In these breathtaking novellas, A.S. Byatt returns to the territory she explored in Possession: the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Angels and Insects is "delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality" (San Francisco Examiner).
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Angels and Insects Library Edition by A. S. Byatt ( 2009) |
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Angels and Insects Library Edition by A. S. Byatt ( 2009) |
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The Annotated Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm K. Grimm, Jacob L. Grimm ( 2004)
Maria Tatar redefines the Grimm canon with this authoritative and entertaining collection.
The Annotated Brothers Grimm celebrates the richness and dramatic power of the legendary fables in the most spectacular and unusual Grimm volume in decades. Containing forty stories in new translations by Maria Tatar—including "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Rapunzel"—the book also features 150 illustrations, many of them in color, by legendary painters such as George Cruikshank and Arthur Rackham; hundreds of annotations that explore the historical origins, cultural complexities, and psychological effects of these tales; and a biographical essay on the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Perhaps most noteworthy is Tatar's decision to include tales that were previously excised, including a few bawdy stories and others that were removed after the Grimms learned that parents were reading the book to their children—stories about cannibalism in times of famine and stories in which children die at the end. Enchanting and magical, The Annotated Brothers Grimm will cast its spell on children and adults alike for decades to come. 75 color, 75 black-and-white illustrations. |
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The Arabian Nights Tales from a Thousand and One Nights by ( 2001)
Presents a collection of tales, including "Aladdin," "The Wonderful Lamp," "Sinbad the Seaman," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves."
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Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt ( 1997)
At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishments 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 schools 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.Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.
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The Bell by Iris Murdoch ( 2001)
The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, follows the lives of Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by his homosexual former lover. Repriint.
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Beloved by Toni Morrison ( 2006)
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. 25,000 first printing.
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Besessen by A. S. Byatt ( 1994) |
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The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt ( 2001)
Phineas G. Nanson, an English graduate student, begins researching the life of a famous and revered biographer named Scholes Destry-Scholes, finding out in the process that he distorted his subjects' lives and often made things up. In addition, Nanson discovers several parallels between his own life and that of Destry-Scholes, including his involvement with two women, one of them his own niece. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001.
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Bird Hand Book by A. S. Byatt ( 2001) |
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The Bostonians by Henry James ( 2003)
This brilliant satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?
“The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James,” writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction. “It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals . . . [written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed—and wildly comic—realism.” |
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Bp Portrait Award 2003 by A. S. Byatt ( 2003) |
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The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt ( 2009)
A.S. Byatt has crafted a landmark novel of Europe at the turn of the 20th century, centered on a children's book writer whose eerie fables and fairy tales reflect the dark secrets hidden in her family's history. In 1895, Olive Wellwood seems to be living an idyllic existence--she is married to a pillar of Victorian society, pregnant with her seventh child, and working diligently on her popular series of children's books. But Olive's artistic endeavors are filled with hints of sorrow and regret which gradually push towards the surface, and this pseudo-exposure has its own dark effects on her neglected children, resulting in a relentless cycle of almost masochistic anguish. These subliminal distress signals are broadcast more explicitly in the works of the Fludds, another family of artists in the Wellwoods' social circle, whose fate is intricately linked to the Wellwoods by chains of sex, pain and creativity. As global forces collide in the first World War, Byatt's vast menagerie of characters must chose how to participate in an event where the suffering is certain to be more overt than they are used to. The erudite Byatt has outdone herself with this historical epic, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and selected as an Editor's Choice Book of the Year 2009 by Atlantic magazine.
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Daniel Deronda by A. S. Byatt, George Eliot ( 2000)
George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel is considered by many to be her greatest. First published in installments in 1874-76, Daniel Deronda is a richly imagined epic with a mysterious hero at its heart. Deronda, a high-minded young man searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a series of dramatic encounters into two contrasting worlds: the English country-house life of Gwendolen Harleth, a high-spirited beauty trapped in an oppressive marriage, and the very different lives of a poor Jewish girl, Mirah, and her family. As Deronda uncovers the long-hidden secret of his own parentage, Eliot's moving and suspenseful narrative opens up a world of Jewish experience previously unknown to the Victorian novel.
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Deadly Sins by A. S. Byatt, Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Howard, William Trevor, John Updike, Edgar Box ( 1996)
Here are eight of the world's most famous authors ruminating on their favorite transgressions: Thomas Pynchon on Sloth, Mary Gordon on Anger, John Updike on Lust, William Trevor on Gluttony, Richard Howard on Avarice, Gore Vidal on Pride, A. S. Byatt on Envy, Joyce Carol Oates on Despair.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather ( 2006)
Cather's episodic novel, based on a true story but heavily fictionalized, is about the literal and spiritual journey of Bishop Lamy and his vicar in the American Southwest in the mid-1800s, and is a tribute to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to improve the lives of the Hopi and Navajo Indians in the area. Full of readable and fascinating stories, the novel is also, because of its bold and experimental use of allegory and symbolism, a prime example of modernism at its height.
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Degrees of Freedom The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch by A. S. Byatt ( 1994)
Examines Iris Murdoch's early works of fiction and main philosophical ideas, relating the two and providing an insight into the larger dimensions of the novels. Byatt's survey groups and interrelates the novels, picks out recurrent themes and presents the key ideas.
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Degrees of Freedom:the Novels of Iris Murdoch The Novels of Iris Murdoch by A. S. Byatt ( 1970) |
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The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye Five Fairy Stories by A. S. Byatt ( 1998)
The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As A.S. Byatt renders this relationship with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable.The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatts remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all us to inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor."A dreamy treat.... It is not merely strange, it is wondrous."--Boston Globe
"Alternatingly erudite and earthy, direct and playful.... If Scheherazade ever needs a break, Byatt can step in, indefinitely."--Chicago Tribune "Byatt's writing is crystalline and splendidly imaginative.... These [are] perfectly formed tales."--Washington Post Book World |
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Elementals Stories of Fire and Ice by A. S. Byatt ( 2000)
An anthology of stories explores the theme of opposites--alienation and passion, life and art--in the tales of a woman who feels the need to flee after witnessing her husband's death and that of a princess from a cold climate who marries a prince from a desert kingdom.
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Faust A Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ( 2009)
Peter Sis's eerie illustrations accompany Jarrell's translations of Goethe's FAUST, PART I, which he translated during the last decade of his life. When Jarrell died before completing the task in 1965, Robert Lowell stepped in to finish the job. Goethe's German is rendered in unrhymed English.
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Faust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ( 2005)
Jarrell worked on this translation, expressed in several meters and blank verse, for the seven years preceding his death in 1965. Here, illustrations by the Czech artist Peter Sis accompany the text.
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The Fifth Queen by A. S. Byatt, Ford Madox Ford ( 1999)
This masterful performance of historical fiction centers on Katharine Howard -- clever, beautiful, and outspoken -- who catches the jaded eye of Henry VIII and becomes his fifth Queen. Corruption and fear pervade the King's court, and the dimly lit corridors vibrate with the intrigues of unscrupulous courtiers hungry for power. Soon Katharine is locked in a vicious battle with Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, as she fights for political and religious change. Ford saw the past as an integral part of the present experience and understanding, and his sharply etched vision of the court of Henry VIII -- first published in 1908 -- echoes aspects of Edwardian England as it explores the pervading influence of power, lies, fear, and anxiety on people's lives.
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The Game by A. S. Byatt ( 1992)
The Game is a lush and disturbing novel portraying a sibling rivalry which compels the reader to reconsider the uses and misuses of imagination. when they were little girls, Cassandra and Julia played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance. Now the sisters are grown, and hostile strangers--until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over, reenters their lives.
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The Grimm Reader The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm by ( 2010) |
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Imagining Characters Six Conversations about Women Writers by A. S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre, Rebecca Swift ( 1995)
In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.
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Imagining Characters Conversations About Women Writers Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison by A. S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre ( 1997)
In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austens Mansfield Park, Brontes Villette, George Elliots Daniel Deronda, Willa Cathers The Professors House, Iris Murdochs An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.
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Iris Murdoch by A. S. Byatt ( 1976) |
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Julie Heffernan Everything That Rises by A. S. Byatt, David Humphrey, State University of New York at Albany, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Julie Heffernan, Columbia Museum of Art (1998) ( 2006) |
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Kees Fens Finding the Place Selected Essays on English Literature by W. Bronzwaer, H. Verdaasdonk ( 1994) |
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The Little Black Book Of Stories by A. S. Byatt ( 2005)
Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grownups. 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. |
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The Magic Mountain A Novel by John E. Woods, Thomas Mann ( 2005)
A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self-identity.
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The Man Of Fifty by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ( 2004) |
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The Matisse Stories by A. S. Byatt ( 1996)
These three 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
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Middlemarch by George Eliot ( 2000)
In nineteenth-century England, Dorthea Brooke's wishes to defy social conventions are inhibited by the strict nature of her surroundings.
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The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot ( 2003)
Based on George Eliot's own growing-up years, this 1860 novel is her most overtly autobiographical work. Even the precisely described scenery reflects the area in Warwickshire where she was raised. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS is the story of affectionate, willful Maggie Tulliver, who is hungry for knowledge and experience, and her more conventional and intolerant brother, Tom--a relationship that mirrors that of George Eliot herself and her beloved brother, Isaac. When Maggie's virtue is compromised on an excursion with her cousin's fiancé, her brother repudiates her, and the two become estranged. The book's rather lurid ending--which involves a devastating flood--is controversial: it has even been considered by some critics to have incestuous overtones. But there is no denying that the ending is thematically appropriate, functioning not only as a dramatic climax to the events but as a metaphor for the passion that is the driving force in the story. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, one of George Eliot's most enduring novels, is a particularly satisfying example of her domestic realism and her intense sensitivity to the rhythms of rural life.
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My Antonia by Willa Cather ( 2006)
This novel about the friendship between two Nebraska children, Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda is considered Cather's masterpiece. The fortunes of the two families are opposed: the Burdens thrive while the Shimerdas decline, a downfall that culminates in the suicide of Antonia's father, which forces the girl to work in the fields and then as a servant. Throughout all her trials, Antonia's strength, humor, and goodness sustain her and her family--and Jim, for whom she is a lifelong inspiration and mentor. Willa Cather called this novel "the best thing I've done."
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Narrative Desire And Historical Reparations A.s. Byatt, Ian Mcewan, And Salman Rushdie by A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Guathier ( 2005) This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these "historical" novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. Scrutinizing representative novels from Byatt, McEwan and Rushdie, contemporary fiction is revealed as capable of advocating a viable ethical stance and as a form of authentic commentary. Our anxieties often exist in response to what might be perceived as the oppression or eradication of values, whether this is through the modern repudiation of Victorian principles (Byatt), the Western rethinking of Enlightenment narratives in light of the Holocaust (McEwan), or pluralism threatened by religious fundamentalism (Rushdie). Each of these novelists differentially employs postmodern artifice, sometimes as a way to reject the notion of historical construction, sometimes to advocate for it, but always to bring us closer to what |
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On Histories and Stories Selected Essays by A. S. Byatt ( 2001)
This collection of essays by novelist A. S. Byatt addresses aspects of narrative. In a personal piece, she reveals how she draws on literary sources in her own writing; the other pieces are more theoretical and regard the history of the novel form and its various practitioners. In "Ancestors," she examines the ways that the natural sciences have affected various writers. She also comments on why she often writes historical novels, in contrast to her sister,the novelist Margaret Drabble, whose novels are about the "ugly, incomprehensible" present.
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The Oxford Book of English Short Stories by ( 1998)
This eclectic collection of stories ranges from Dickens to Ballard and exhibits the capacious and often capricious nature of the English literary sensibility.
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Passions of the Mind Selected Writings by A. S. Byatt ( 1993)
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.
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Patrick Heron by Patrick Heron, Tate Gallery, David Sylvester, Martin Gayford, A. S. Byatt ( 1998) |
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The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 by Laura Furman ( 2009) |
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Portraits in Fiction by A. S. Byatt ( 2001)
The extended version of a lecture given by Byatt at London's National Portrait Gallery in 2000, about portraits in fiction and about portraits of writers of fiction. She delves into the complex relations between the two, ranging from Henry James to Iris Murdoch and Botticelli to Manet.
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Posesion/ Possession by A. S. Byatt ( 2001)
Maud Bailey is a scholar researching the life and work of her distant relative, a little known 19th-century poet named Christabel LaMotte. Roland Mitchell is looking into an obscure moment in the life of another Victorian poet, the celebrated Randolph Henry Ash. Together, the two uncover a dark secret in Ash's life: though apparently happily married, he conducted a torrid affair with LaMotte that has never before come to light. As Maud and Roland dig into the facts, they also find themselves falling in love. A.S. Byatt cleverly evokes the world of the Victorians, juxtaposing it to the dryer, less passionate lives of her modern-day protagonists. She also has created extremely convincing letters and love poetry, ostensibly by each of the poets. As the truth about the past emerges, it also illuminates the present--and changes it radically.
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Possession A Romance by A. S. Byatt ( 1991)
An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom.
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The Quest for Corvo An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons ( 2001)
This is the life of Frederick Rolfe, known as Baron Corvo--painter, teacher, photographer, novelist, historian, and expatriate. His life is fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately tragic. This is the book by which AJA Symons, who died in 1941, is remembered.
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Selected Essays, Poems And Other Writings by A. S. Byatt, George Eliot, Nicholas Warren ( 2006)
Although George Eliot was noted primarily for her fiction, she wrote poems all her adult life, frequently using passages of them as epigraphs in her novels. Her poetry includes "O May I Join the Choir Invisible," "Agatha," and a sonnet sequence entitled BROTHER AND SISTER, based on her own childhood and her beloved brother, Isaac. Her best-known poems are collected here, along with critical essays and journalism.
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The Shadow of the Sun by A. S. Byatt ( 1998)
Written when A.S. Byatt was an undergraduate, THE SHADOW OF THE SUN is the story of 17-year-old Anna Severel, daughter of a lionized novelist. As Anna struggles to get a grip on her own life, she knows that, in order to survive, she must somehow throw off the influence of her father. A classic coming-of-age story, Byatt's first novel introduces one of the themes that will inform her later work: the artist's relentless search for identity.
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So I Have Thought of You The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald by Penelope Fitzgerald ( 2010) |
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Still Life by A. S. Byatt ( 1997)
From the author of The New York Times bestseller Possession, comes a highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one extended English family--and illuminates the choices they must make between domesticity and ambition, life and art. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, writes of Byatt: "When it comes to probing characters her scalpel is sure but gentle. She is a loving surgeon".
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Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt ( 1992)
A.S. Byatts short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that 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...a bright, sensual prose that seems to paint rather than describe, giving a teacup, a mountainside, or the night sky a texture and density that go beyond words on a page."--Evening Standard
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Th Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye by A. S. Byatt ( 1997)
Five long stories based on folk or fairy tales. The title story is actually a novella about a woman who is granted three wishes by a djinn.
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Unruly Times Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time by A. S. Byatt ( 1990) |
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Villette by Charlotte Bronte, Deborah Lutz ( 2001) "Villette! Villette! Have you read it?" exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë's final novel appeared in 1853. "It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power." Arguably Brontë's most refined and deeply felt work, Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette,flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new file as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her freindship with a wordly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë's strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free. "Villette is an amazing book," observed novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. "Written before psychoanalysis came into being, Villette is nevertheless a psychoanalytic work—a psychosexual study of its heroine, Lucy Snowe. Written before the philosophy of existentialism was formulated, the novel's view of the world can only be described as existential. . . . Today it is read and discussed more intensely than Charlotte Brontë's other novels, and many critics now beleive it to be a true master-piece, a work of genius that more than fulfilled the promise of Jane Eyre." Indeed, Virginia Woolf judged Villette to be Brontë's "finest novel." |
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Vintage Byatt by A. S. Byatt ( 2004)
Fabulist, realist, critic, and winner of the Booker Prize for her now-classic novel Possession, A. S. Byatt has boundless intellectual and literary gifts and a fathomless imagination on which to nourish them. Her novels, stories, and essays allow us to see both our own and other worlds and times and, perhaps most brilliantly, the connections between them.
Vintage Byatt includes a self-contained section from the bestselling Possession; selections from the Matisse Stories, Elementals, Sugar and Other Stories, and the recent Little Black Book of Stories; and essays from the collection Passions of the Mind. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions. |
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The Virgin in the Garden by A. S. Byatt ( 1993)
In THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN, Byatt begins her series of four novels about the startlingly intellectual Potter family. In this first installment, it is the early '50s, the war is just over, and Elizabeth II has just been crowned queen of England. The plot revolves around an amateur dramatic production of the life of the earlier Queen Elizabeth, and ends as a kind of coming-of-age novel in which Frederica, the most ambitious of the Potter children, begins to realize the necessity of escaping from her smothering family.
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A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt ( 2003)
This fourth book in A. S. Byatt's series about Frederica Potter takes her heroine into London, where she is the host of a TV program about the arts. She also becomes involved with a religious cult and its charismatic leader, Joshua Ramsden. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
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Wonder Tales by ( 1996)
One upon a time, in the Paris of Louis XIV, five ladies and a gentleman - all of them urbane aristocrats - seized on the new enthusiasm for "Mother Goose stories" and decided to write some of them down. Telling stories resourcefully and artfully was a key social grace for them, and when they wrote down these elegant narratives, they consciously invented the modern fairy tale as we still know it today. For this beautiful anthology of six masterpiece Wonder Tales, Marina Warner invited the collaboration of five writers with a special sympathy for the French stories they render here in burnished, cunning, and amusing English".The White Cat" (translated by John Ashbery), "The Subtle Princess (Gilbert Adair), "Bearskin" and "Starlight" (Terence Cave), "The Counterfeit Marquise" (Ranjit Bolt), and "The Great Green Worm" (A. S. Byatt) are as unforgettable today as they were when they were first published centuries ago.
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Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time by A. S. Byatt ( 1970) |
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