Editorial Content for Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Reviewer (text)
Gregory D. Sumner’s UNSTUCK IN TIME sets out to to collect and analyze all of Kurt Vonnegut's work with respect to his biography. This is a weighty task, and one Sumner attempts out of a love for Vonnegut that is obvious throughout the book's pages. However, the scope of the project is so large that he can't quite do justice to the task --- nor could anyone, perhaps --- and the book turns out to be more an index of every Vonnegut novel than a complete analysis or biography. Read More
Teaser
Gregory Sumner guides us through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms.
Promo
Gregory Sumner guides us through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms.
About the Book
In UNSTUCK IN TIME, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, his 14 novels starting with PLAYER PIANO (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms.
Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and "winners" over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality --- something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.”
Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.
Editorial Content for The Artist of Disappearance
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Anita Desai --- the Indian-born novelist whose previous works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times --- now offers this slim but surprisingly cohesive collection of three novellas, all of which share a strong sense of place and a concern for the convergence of hope and expectation with reality and disappointment. Read More
Teaser
Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate.
Promo
Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate.
About the Book
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.
Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings --- as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.
Editorial Content for Mozart's Last Aria
Book
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
To me, Mozart is a god. I was brought up that way. My pianist mother played his music. My grandmother wrote a children’s biography dedicated to me and my brother. The Magic Flute is my favorite opera. And I didn’t much like Amadeus because Mozart is portrayed as a crude, childish oaf, almost an idiot savant. Read More
Teaser
Award-winning author Matt Rees takes readers to 18th-century Austria, where Mozart's estranged sister stumbles into a world of ambition, conspiracy and immortal music while attempting to uncover the truth about her brother's suspicious death.
Promo
Award-winning author Matt Rees takes readers to 18th-century Austria, where Mozart's estranged sister stumbles into a world of ambition, conspiracy and immortal music while attempting to uncover the truth about her brother's suspicious death.
About the Book
The news arrives in a letter to his sister, Nannerl, in December 1791. But the message carries more than word of Nannerl’s brother’s demise. Two months earlier, Mozart confided to his wife that his life was rapidly drawing to a close...and that he knew he had been poisoned.
In Vienna to pay her final respects, Nannerl soon finds herself ensnared in a web of suspicion and intrigue --- as the actions of jealous lovers, sinister creditors, rival composers, and Mozart’s Masonic brothers suggest that dark secrets hastened the genius to his grave. As Nannerl digs deeper into the mystery surrounding her brother’s passing, Mozart’s black fate threatens to overtake her as well.
Transporting readers to the salons and concert halls of 18th-century Austria, MOZART'S LAST ARIA is a magnificent historical mystery that pulls back the curtain on a world of soaring music, burning passion and powerful secrets.
