Christina Stead And The Matter Of America

Author : Fiona Morrison
Publisher : Sydney University Press
ISBN 13 : 1743324502
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Christina Stead and the Matter of America written by Fiona Morrison and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality. In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1453265252
Total Pages : 733 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Man Who Loved Children written by Christina Stead and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0522860540
Total Pages : 761 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Letty Fox written by Christina Stead and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. Letty Fox: Her Luck, Christina Stead's sixth novel, was first published in New York in 1946, and banned in Australia for its salaciousness. Set in wartime Manhattan and told in Letty's own spiky and exuberant voice, the novel follows her successes and failures in the game of 'being somebody'. Letty's tireless pursuit of love and sex provides the setting for Stead's brilliant satire of marriage, desire and the conventions that surround them.

Author : Rebecca Stead
Publisher : Wendy Lamb Books
ISBN 13 : 0375899537
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Liar & Spy written by Rebecca Stead and published by Wendy Lamb Books. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller from the author of the Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me: a story about spies, games, and friendship. The first day Georges (the S is silent) moves into a new Brooklyn apartment, he sees a sign taped to a door in the basement: SPY CLUB MEETING—TODAY! That’s how he meets his twelve-year-old neigh­bor Safer. He and Georges quickly become allies—and fellow spies. Their assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer’s requests become more and more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend? “Will touch the hearts of kids and adults alike.” —NPR Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more!

Author : Kate Grenville
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 080219768X
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lieutenant written by Kate Grenville and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young astronomer in colonial Australia faces tragedy on the ground in this follow-up to the award-winning The Secret River—“A triumph. Read it at once” (The Sunday Times, UK). A stunning follow-up to her Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning book, The Secret River, Grenville’s The Lieutenant is a gripping story of friendship, self-discovery, and the power of language set along the unspoiled shores of 1788 New South Wales, Australia. As a boy, Daniel Rooke was an outsider. Ridiculed in school for his intellect and misunderstood by his parents, he finds a path for himself in the British Navy—and in his love for astronomy. As a young lieutenant, Daniel joins a voyage to Australia. And while his countrymen struggle to control their cargo of convicts and communicate with nearby Aboriginal tribes, Daniel constructs an observatory to chart the stars and begin the work he prays will make him famous. Out on his isolated point, Daniel becomes involved with the local Aborigines, forging an intimate connection with one girl that will change the course of his life. But when his compatriots come into conflict with the indigenous population, Daniel must turn away from the stars and declare his loyalties on the ground.

Author : Lorrie Moore
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385351712
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bark written by Lorrie Moore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of stories by one of America’s most beloved and admired short-story writers, her first in fifteen years, since Birds of America (“Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial . . . Will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.” —The New York Times Book Review, cover). These eight masterly stories reveal Lorrie Moore at her most mature and in a perfect configuration of craft, mind, and bewitched spirit, as she explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom. In “Debarking,” a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see—in all its irresistible wit and darkness—the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake . . . In “Foes,” a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest themselves at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown . . . In “The Juniper Tree,” a teacher visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend is forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a kind of nightmare reunion . . . And in “Wings,” we watch the inevitable unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, neither of whom held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths, as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead-ends-ville and the workings of regret . . . Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad, having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection . . . stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives, with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relation—to someone . . . Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud—the hallmark of life in Lorrie-Moore-land. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Text Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1925410153
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Little Tea, a Little Chat written by Christina Stead and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match: Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he cannot best. A sardonic commentary on sexual relations and war as potent as when it was first published in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat holds up a mirror to the corruption and cravenness of our late-capitalist moment. Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century. ‘[Christina Stead] is really marvellous.’ Saul Bellow ‘A sprawling character study...Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.’ Kirkus reviews, starred review

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0522862527
Total Pages : 856 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book House of All Nations written by Christina Stead and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: House of All Nations is Christina Stead's 1938 gripping portrayal of financial world success. Set in an exclusive European bank in the heady days of the early thirties, Stead weaves a remarkable tale of greedy, devious and shady characters, all brought together by their love of money. The director of the bank, Jules Bertillon, leads these gamblers, crooks and prospectors on a treacherous journey navigating political and natural disasters, and using both to his advantage. House of All Nations has never been more relevant, as Stead's remarkable work speaks loudly about the modern markets.

Author : Paul Crosthwaite
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198891792
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Speculative Time written by Paul Crosthwaite and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Random House Australia
ISBN 13 : 0522869556
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Salzburg Tales written by Christina Stead and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of visitors to the Salzburg Festival, brought together by chance, decides to mark time by telling tales. Their fantasies, legends, tragedies, jokes and parodies come together as The Salzburg Tales. Dazzling in their richness and vitality, the tales are grounded in Christina Stead's belief that 'the story is magical . what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one'. Originally published eighty years ago, these are thoroughly modern stories that invite comparison with Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Salzburg Tales are published here with a new introduction by Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead.