Lucy Gayheart

Lucy Gayheart PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679728880
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

Lucy Gayheart

Lucy Gayheart PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679728880
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons PDF Author: Kathleen Hill
Publisher: Delphinium
ISBN: 9781883285746
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Beginning with a Best American award-winning narrative, Kathleen Hill’s memoir explores defining moments of a life illuminated by novels, read in Nigeria and France and at home in New York. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author by chance reads Willa Cather’s novel, Lucy Gayheart, and is prepared against her will for death by drowning. And prepared for the teacher’s confessions to the class of a frustrated ambition to become a pianist, her regret for a life that will never be. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, the author gives Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism. And loses her American innocence when she visits a nearby abandoned slave port and connects its rusting shackles with the students sitting before her. Reading A Portrait of a Lady, also in Nigeria, she ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer’s cautionary fate, remembers her own adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. A few years later, this time in a town in northern France, haunted by Madame Bovary, by Emma’s solitude and boredom, she puts aside Flaubert’s novel and discovers in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest the poverty and suffering she had failed to see all around her. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author’s friendship with the writer, Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust’s masterwork, an undertaking that takes six years to complete. Faced with Diana’s approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading after all may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.

One of Ours

One of Ours PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: IndyPublish.com
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Claude has an intuitive faith in something splendid and feels at odds with his contemporaries. The war offers him the opportunity to forget his farm and his marriage of compromise; he enlists and discovers that he has lacked. But while war demands altruism, its essence is destructive

Coming Through Slaughter

Coming Through Slaughter PDF Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307776611
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place. In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.

The Burglar’s Christmas

The Burglar’s Christmas PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724395
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
First published in 1896, The Burglar’s Christmas is a short story by the great American writer Willa Cather. Set in Chicago on a cold Christmas Eve, the down-and-out Crawford learns the value of forgiveness. 'The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.' — Rebecca West 'Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page.' — Marina Warner

My Mortal Enemy

My Mortal Enemy PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307805247
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness. As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherwordly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"Shadows on the Rock" is a historical novel written by the American author Willa Cather. The book was published in 1931 and is set in the 17th century in colonial New France, specifically in Quebec City. The novel focuses on the lives of the early French settlers and the challenges they faced while establishing a life in the rugged wilderness of North America. The central character is Cécile Auclair, a young girl who, with her father, makes the difficult journey from France to Quebec to join her mother. The novel provides a vivid portrayal of daily life, relationships, and the interactions between the French settlers and the indigenous people of the region. "Shadows on the Rock" is known for its rich historical detail and evocative descriptions of the landscape and characters. Willa Cather's storytelling captures the enduring spirit and resilience of the early settlers in North America. The novel is celebrated for its historical accuracy and its exploration of the human experience in a challenging and often harsh environment.

Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings (LOA #57)

Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings (LOA #57) PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1062

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Book Description
A collection of stories, poems, and other writings by Willa Cather.

Cather Studies

Cather Studies PDF Author: Cather Studies
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803239104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Volume 2 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather?s work for the informed reader or the specialized student.This volume includes major essays on Cather's response to the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, her affinities to Alphonse Daudet, and aspects of her art in My Antonia, The Professor's House, and Shadows on the Rock.

The Voyage Perilous

The Voyage Perilous PDF Author: Susan J. Rosowski
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803289864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
They Voyage Perilousis the first extended interpretation of Willa Cather's writing within the literary tradition of romanticism. Although she partook of the familiar subjects and themes of the Wordsworthian school of romanticism, Cather was not nearly so concerned with what we see as how we see. Her intensely individual perspective, more creatively romantic than has been previously recognized, gave her work its own kind of elegant form. ø Susan J. Rosowski argues that Willa Cather early took up the romantic challenge to vindicate imaginative thought in a world threatened by materialism, then pursued it with remarkable consistency throughout her career. The early essays and stories set out the terms of this life-long commitment. In the early novels Cather celebrates imaginative possibilities; in the middle ones she present increasingly desperate circumstances, asking what is left when the imagination is eclipsed by commercial values; in the late novels she writes in a Gothic mode, the dark counterspirit to optimistic romanticism. ø The book is organized chronologically, with a chapter devoted to each novel. The chapters can be read independently or as part of a unified argument providing a larger picture.