Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 737 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2001-10-16
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780375726637

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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus Pdf

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 736 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2010-09-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307764119

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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus Pdf

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 1999-02-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780375702037

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Plays Well with Others by Allan Gurganus Pdf

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family. Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace. Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1000902476

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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus Pdf

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2013-11-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781472113245

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Local Souls by Allan Gurganus Pdf

In his first work of fiction in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the mythic site of his immortal novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Time has passed; the Internet has arrived; but the daily human dramas in Falls, North Carolina prove that old habits die hard. A banker's daughter seeks the child she was forced to relinquish at birth . . . The disappearance of a star high school student sends ripples through the town, creating a cult led by her stricken mother . . . The friendship between two married men is tested by a devastating flood. Local Souls is a universal tale of gigantic hopes battling small-town conventions - a dark comedy of adultery, obsession and incest, told with affection and piercing insight.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2021-01-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781631498763

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The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus by Allan Gurganus Pdf

One of “the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett) offers this hilarious yet haunting cycle of stories—all previously uncollected. Since the explosive publication of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus has dazzled readers as “the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation” (John Cheever). He has been praised as "one of America’s preeminent novelists, our prime conductor of electric sentences" (William Giraldi). Above all, Allan Gurganus is a seriously funny writer, an expert at evoking humor, especially in our troubled times. Now he offers nine classic tales—never before between covers. They attest to his mastery of the short story and the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition—masked and unmasked—as we live it now. “Once upon a time” collides with the everyday. We meet a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their family dog from Maine’s fierce undertow. A virginal seventy-eight-year-old grammar school librarian has her sole erotic experience with a polyamorous snake farmer. A vicious tornado sends twin boys aloft, leaving only one of them alive. And, in an eerily prescient story, cholera strikes a rural village in 1849 and citizens come to blame their doomed young doctor who saved hundreds. These meticulously crafted parables recall William Faulkner’s scope and Flannery O’Connor’s corrosive wit. Imbuing each story with charged drama, Gurganus, a sublime ventriloquist, again proves himself among our funniest writers and our wisest.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2010-09-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307764126

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White People by Allan Gurganus Pdf

A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book In eleven glorious stories, Allan Gurganus, author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gives heart-breaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires, and triumphs of Americans—black and white, gay and straight, old and young, Northern and especially Southern. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, vacationing senior citizens confronted by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time. The title novella of White People won the National Magazine Prize

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2010-09-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307764140

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The Practical Heart by Allan Gurganus Pdf

A luminous quartet, five years in the writing, reveals even more fully the breathtaking range of "a storyteller in the grand tradition" (New York Times). Allan Gurganus's voice--by turn bawdy and serene, folkloric and profane--deepens as it soars into this quiet masterwork. Four new fables--rich in event, comedy, experience--surge with the force of history's headlines versus sidestreet human fortitude. Improbable heroes and heroines spiral outward from Gurganus's familiar Carolina terrain. Each fires into a wild and differing direction, all in quest of some fantasy that's practically impossible: --An impoverished immigrant has her portrait painted (or not) by John Singer Sargent. --A young man's devotion to saving eighteenth-century homes—and their odd lingering ghosts—helps him find unlikely ways to renovate his own mortality. --A pillar of the community becomes, over the course of one cartoon matinee, its pariah. --A beloved, transfixingly homely father shows his village and his only son a decency stronger than race, humiliation, or even death itself. These characters' quixotic missions prove mysterious, often even to themselves. Their legacies are not easily deciphered. And yet, their most impractical wishes soon become the heartiest facts about each. They manage to wrest battle-courage from everyday indecision. Out of superstition and convention, they lift certainty. They each find a wealth of consoling truths banked--immortal--in the all-too-human heart. Allan Gurganus's great powers--announced more than a decade ago by Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--here achieve a yearning exuberance worthy of a new Whitman. These leaps of sexual longing, empathy, and faith become a major new gift from this essential fablemaker.

Author : Allan Gurganus,Jane Holding
Publisher : Samuel French, Inc.
Page : 34 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780573662997

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Oldest Living Confederate Widow by Allan Gurganus,Jane Holding Pdf

Lucy Marsden, 99 years old, scares and charms us as the widow of the American Civil War¿s last surviving soldier. His child bride and the mother of his nine children, she now lives alone, the survivor of the survivor. A born storyteller, a woman of passion and compassion, she finally confesses her own marriage as the secret history of War itself. The role of Lucy¿funny, irreverent, candid, and heartfelt¿offers the actress of any age a sampler for her every emotion and available skill. By the time her telling is complete, we feel the full terror and pity of the domestic life and the Civil War combined. Based on the classic best-selling novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, this one-woman aria for stage constitutes a new work of art¿fresh, humorous and terrifying. Oscar- and Tony-winner Ellen Burstyn created the role on Broadway.

Author : Reynolds Price
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : American fiction
ISBN : 9781439109342

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A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price Pdf

The troubled love story of Rosacoke (Rosa) Mustian and Wesley Beavers in rural North Carolina.

Author : Sarah Sparrow
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2018-03-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780399574542

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A Guide for Murdered Children by Sarah Sparrow Pdf

"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book." –David Cronenberg Terrifying, thoroughly original and hauntingly written, A Guide for Murdered Children is a psychological thriller—and otherworldly surprise. We’ve heard it said that there is no justice in this world. But what if there really was? What if the souls of murdered children were able to briefly return, inhabit adult bodies and wreak revenge on the monstrous killers who stole their lives? Such is the unthinkable mystery confronting ex-NYPD detective Willow Wylde, fresh out of rehab and finally able to find a job running a Cold Case squad in suburban Detroit. When the two rookie cops assigned to him take an obsessive interest in a decades-old disappearance of a brother and sister, Willow begins to suspect something out of the ordinary is afoot. And when he uncovers a series of church basement AA-type meetings made up of the slain innocents, a new way of looking at life, death, murder—and missed opportunities—is revealed to him. Mystical, harrowing and powerfully moving, A Guide for Murdered Children is a genre-busting, mind-bending twist on the fine line between the ordinary… and the unfathomable.

Author : Whitney Terrell
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2016-06-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780374712556

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The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Pdf

The Good Lieutenant literally starts with a bang as an operation led by Lieutenant Emma Fowler of the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion goes spectacularly wrong. Men are dead--one, a young Iraqi, by her hand. Others were soldiers in her platoon. And the signals officer, Dixon Pulowski. Pulowski is another story entirely--Fowler and Pulowski had been lovers since they met at Fort Riley in Kansas. From this conflagration, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspicious informants and questionable intelligence, their very mission the result of a previous snafu in which a soldier had been kidnapped by insurgents. And then even further back, before things began to go so wrong, we see the backstory unfold from points of view that usually are not shown in war coverage--a female frontline officer, for one, but also jaded career soldiers and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent. Ultimately, as all these stories unravel, what is revealed is what happens when good intentions destroy, experience distorts, and survival becomes everything. Brilliantly told and expertly captured by a terrific writer at the top of his form, Whitney Terrell's The Good Lieutenantis a gripping, insightful, necessary novel about a war that is proving to be the defining tragedy of our time.

Author : Ha Jin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307430113

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War Trash by Ha Jin Pdf

Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.

Author : Allan Gurganus
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : African Americans
ISBN : UOM:39015021857514

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Blessed Assurance by Allan Gurganus Pdf

Narrator reflects on his experiences collecting funeral insurance premiums from poor blacks in North Carolina.

Author : Christopher Bram
Publisher : Twelve
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2012-02-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780446575980

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Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram Pdf

This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.