The Grandmothers

The Grandmothers PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061847666
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

The Grandmothers

The Grandmothers PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061847666
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061582484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 177089022X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
In her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures Doris Lessing addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions, and inherited structures of unquestioned belief. The Nobel Prize-winning author of more than thirty books, Doris Lessing is one of our most challenging and important writers.

Shikasta

Shikasta PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780006547198
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

The Fiction of Doris Lessing

The Fiction of Doris Lessing PDF Author: Ratna Raman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9390252555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Doris Lessing (1919–2013), a prolific contemporary author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 for her life work. Examining five decades of Lessing's unique life, narrative strategies, and the literary traditions that she drew upon and improvised, this book highlights her extraordinary significance as a writer of our times and for our times. Lessing's fiction and non-fiction provide a seminal understanding of the key issues that shaped the twentieth century. Autodidactic and keenly interested in the world around her, Lessing flagged the problems of racism in Africa; the inequity of class in modern England; the limitations of white, middle-class women's movements that overlooked the rights of women across race and class; the marginalisation of individuals; the horror of nuclear war and the need for disarmament; and the hazardous global expansion in the face of unrelenting technological progress. Further, she raised the concern of the atomisation of modern families, violence and the urgent need for alternate modes of viewing, voicing anxieties decades ahead of other contemporary writers. Making futuristic projections through innumerable genres of writing, such as realistic narratives, memoirs, diaries and science fiction, Lessing examines myth, psychoanalysis and Marxist perspectives, engaging with a gamut of experiences that have defined modernity, and sets up feminist blueprints that challenge atrophying patriarchal hegemonies.

Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing

Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing PDF Author: Graham Wolfe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000124363
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This volume posits and explores an intermedial genre called theatre-fiction, understood in its broadest sense as referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre. Though theatre has made star appearances in dozens of literary fictions, including many by modern history’s most influential authors, no full-length study has dedicated itself specifically to theatre-fiction—in fact there has not even been a recognized name for the phenomenon. Focusing on Britain, where most of the world’s theatre-novels have been produced, and commencing in the late-nineteenth century, when theatre increasingly took on major roles in novels, Theatre-Fiction in Britain argues for the benefits of considering these works in relation to each other, to a history of development, and to the theatre of their time. New modes of intermedial analysis are modelled through close studies of Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, J. B. Priestley, Ngaio Marsh, Angela Carter, and Doris Lessing, all of whom were deeply involved in the theatre-world as playwrights, directors, reviewers, and theorists. Drawing as much on theatre scholarship as on literary theory, Theatre-Fiction in Britain presents theatre-fiction as one of the past century’s most vital means of exploring, reconsidering, and bringing forth theatre’s potentials.

The Good Terrorist

The Good Terrorist PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780007498789
Category : London (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
A powerful contemporary novel about a group of would-be terrorists in London that Susan Brownmiller in Newsday called "a bone-tingling narrative that should stand as the crowning achievement of Lessing's distinguished career".

The Four-Gated City

The Four-Gated City PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007455577
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing PDF Author: Alice Ridout
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441192646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

The Sirian Experiments

The Sirian Experiments PDF Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperPerennial
ISBN: 9780006547211
Category : Allegories
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
'The Sirian Experiments' is the third volume in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series, 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. In this interlinked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction. 'The Sirian Experiments' chronicles the origins of our planet, as the three galactic empires fight for control of the human race. The novel charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, Ambien II, a 'dry, dutiful, efficient' female Sirian administrator. Witnessing the wanton colonization of land and people, Ambien begins to question her involvement in such insidious experimentati- on, her faith in the possibility of human progress itself growing weaker every day.