Greene on Capri

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429979259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story. For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, and Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In Greene on Capri, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work and talk, and the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.

The Great Fire

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

Close to Paradise

Author: Robert I. C. Fisher
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
ISBN: 9780711230385
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
This book showcases twenty-one of the most celebrated gardens in Italy's most glamorous seaside getaway. They include La Reggia, Caserta, the 'Italian Versailles' laid out for the Bourbon King Charles III in the mid-eighteenth century, the gardens of the Villa San Michele on Capri and Lord Grimthorpe's Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, with its breathtaking panoramas. The text also traces the horticultural history of Campania, from Roman emperors to Edwardian millionaires, encompassing a parade of glamorous characters that includes Lord Byron, Wagner, Chanel, Jacqueline Kennedy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene.

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.

The Transit of Venus

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143135651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

Author: Richard Greene
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039365107X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
A Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself. The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. Above all, The Unquiet Englishman shows us a brilliant novelist mastering his craft. A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness, and sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers.

The Bay of Noon

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1466800488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Long out of print, Shirley Hazzard's classic novel of love and memory A young Englishwoman working in Naples, Jenny comes to Italy fleeing a history that threatened to undo her. Alone in the fabulously ruined city, she idly follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance and thus changes her life forever. Through the letter, she meets Giocanda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and Gianni, a famous Roman film director and Giocanda's lover. At work she encounters Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of these three, she discovers that the past--and the patterns of a lifetime--are not easily discarded.

The End of the Affair

Author: Graham Greene
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781407086811
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description

People in Glass Houses

Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466801069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Only those who keep their wit and affections about them will survive the mass conditioning of the Organization, where confusion solemnly rules and conformity is king. As in our world itself, humanity prevails in the courage, love, and laughter of singular spirits--of men and women for whom life is an adventure no Organization can quell, and whose souls remain their own.

In Search of a Beginning

Author: Yvonne Cloetta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Limited
ISBN: 9780747571087
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Yvonne Cloetta was Graham Greene's companion for almost 32 years. Graham knew the time might come when Yvonne's privacy would be invaded. His advice was that she could either refuse to speak or to 'tell the truth'. This Cloetta has done startlingly eloquently - with the help of family friend and biographer Marie Françoise Allain. What emerges is the most intimate account of Greeen we have. Yvonne reveals the considerate, jovial and tender side of the private Graham Greene. She provides a new perspective on the 'old firm' and his contact with the former secret service boss Kim Philby. She portrays him as a man prone to swift justice against any violation of human dignity: who would quit the American Academy of Arts and Letters over America's involvement in Vietnam and forbid his novels to be published in the USSR unless Soviet authorities agreed to give his royalties to the widows of fallen comrades. In Search of a Beginning is a book to send the reader racing either to reread or to discover the novels of Graham Greene, a writer who truly believed you had to go out and see the world to have anything to write about - which of course made his life more interesting than most. The fact that we can now see his life so intimately constitutes a literary milestone.