Search results for ""Author A. S. Byatt""

The perfect gift for Valentine’s DayPossession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

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Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.

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Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

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Frederica Potter arrives at Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love. It isn’t long before she becomes infatuated with a mysterious and controlling poet. Back in Yorkshire, her sister Stephanie abandons academia and is confronted with the boredom and frustrations of motherhood. Meanwhile, their younger brother Marcus begins to recover from a nervous breakdown. Each sibling is desperate to shape their own future, but a horrifying event will soon change their lives forever.

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Each story is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling -- about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being.Their subjects' lives unravel from simple beginnings -- a trip to the hair dresser, a cleaning woman's passion for knitting, lunch in a Chinese restaurant but gradually the veneer of ordinariness is peeled back to expose pain, reveal desire, or express the intensity of joy in color and creation. These stories are all about human beings: about how little we can know (or may care to know) about the people with whom we spend our lives, and how tragic the results of that ignorance or indifference can be.

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The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt, herself the author of several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its theme. The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing. There are all sorts of threads of connection and contrast running through these stories. Their subjects vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim to the farcical. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour, English satire, English dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy. There are examples of social realism, from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories and tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy and science fiction. There are stories of sensibility, precisely delineated, from Hardy's reluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's The Blush, from H. E. Bates's brilliant fusion of class, sex, death, and landscape, to D. H. Lawrence's exploration of a consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world. There are exuberant stories by Saki and Waugh, Wodehouse and Firbank, with a particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated farce. The very range and scope of the collection celebrates the eccentric differences and excellences of English short stories. Some of A. S. Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand tradition of story-telling, while others are more unusual. Many break all the rules of unity of tone and narrative, appearing to be one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject matter. As A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative'.

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Cassandra is an Oxford don; Julia, her sister, a bestselling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories of a strange childhood game and of Simon, the handsome young neighbour who loved them both.Years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes and intrudes into their uneasy compromise of mutual antagonism and distrust. The old, wild emotions surge back, demanding and urgent, and this time the game is played out to a fatal finish.

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A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children's Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her inspiring contribution to life writing' and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

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After her husband becomes violent, Frederica Potter flees with her young son to London. There, she secures a teaching position in an art school, and finds herself surrounded by painters and poets with dreams of rebellion. Then Frederica meets Jude Mason, the strange and charismatic author of a wildly controversial novel. When her husband files for divorce and Jude becomes the target of a high-profile court case, Frederica’s life threatens to spiral out of control.THE THIRD FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

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Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

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**FEATURING THE STORY THAT INSPIRED NEW FILM THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING**A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable readers have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in POSSESSION - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published separately.Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and middle eastern settings. The title story, 'The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye', a long story about an Englishwoman in Turkey who unwittingly releases a genie from his bottle, is a reflection on women's lives, on magic and on the power of storytelling itself, and has inspired the new film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

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In Yorkshire, the Potter family are preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II’s arrival on the throne. Its three youngest members, however, are preoccupied with other matters. Stephanie has grown tired of their overbearing father and resolves to marry the local curate. Anxious teenager Marcus gains a new teacher and suffers increasingly disturbing visions. Then there is Frederica. On the brink of adulthood, a love affair with a young playwright may offer the freedom she desperately desires.THE FIRST FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

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It is 1968 and Frederica Potter is surprised to find herself embarking on a new career in television. While she endeavours to navigate this fast-paced and occasionally bewildering industry, her lover John takes up a post working with a pair of unusual scientists. Yet in Frederica’s home county of Yorkshire, tumultuous events are unfolding. Soon her future, and that of the people closest to her, begins to look rather different.THE FOURTH FREDERICA POTTER NOVEL

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Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it. With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A. S. Byatt brings alive this tumultuous period and shows a deep understanding of the effects upon the minds of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their contemporaries - de Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Byron and Keats.

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In the same delectable format as The Matisse Stories, this collection deals with betrayal and loyalty, quests and longings, loneliness and passion - the mysterious absences at the heart of the fullest lives. A scholar pursues an elusive biographer, stumbling upon buried fragments of distant lives; a woman walks out of her previous existence and encounters an ice-blond stranger from a secretive world; a schoolgirl draws a blood-filled picture of jael; a swimming pool reveals a beauteous monster in its depths. The settings range from the heart of Provence in summer to the cold forests of Scandinavia, form chalk-strewn classrooms to herbscented hillsides, from suburban streets to rocky wilds.

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This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists. Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North. Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived. Acclaimed writer A.S. Byatt traces their genius right to the source.The Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces leading to a workshop where Fortuny created his designs for pleated silks and shining velvets. Here he worked alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the ‘Delphos’ dress – a flowing gown evoking classical Greece.Morris’s Red House, outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns; it also represented a coming together of life and art. But it was Kelmscott Manor in the English countryside that he loved best – even when it became the setting for his wife’s love affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Generously illustrated with the artists’ beautiful designs – pomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vine – A.S. Byatt brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris dazzlingly to life.

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It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.

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Drawing on George Eliot's own childhood experiences to craft an unforgettable story of first love, sibling rivalry and regret, The Mill on the Floss is edited with an introduction and notes by A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, in Penguin Classics.Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother; hunchbacked Tom Wakem, the son of her family's worst enemy; and the charismatic but dangerous Stephen Guest. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.In this edition, writer and critic A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, provides full explanatory notes and an introduction relating The Mill on the Floss to George Eliot's own life and times.Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator, and later editor, of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of 'George Eliot', including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.If you enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, you might like Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, also available in Penguin Classics.

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The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.

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A luminous selection of short stories from the Booker prize-winning A. S. Byatt, celebrating over thirty years of writingWith an introduction by David MitchellByatt takes her readers to a place that is rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, these stories travel from the ancient mythic world to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace. Blazing with creativity, they show what lies beneath the veneer of the ordinary, and reveal the fantastical possibilities beyond.'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful' Sunday Times'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator'Moving, witty and shocking' Sunday Telegraph

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Even after two hundred years, the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm remain among our most powerful stories. Their scenes of unsparing savagery and jaw-dropping beauty remind us that fairy tales, in all their simplicity, have the power to change us. With some of the most famous stories in world literature, including “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” as well as some less well known stories like “The Seven Ravens,” this definitive collection promises to entrance readers with the strange and wonderful world of the Brothers Grimm. Maria Tatar’s engaging preface provides readers with the historical and cultural context to understand what these stories meant and their contemporary resonance. Fans of all ages will be drawn to this elegant and accessible collection of stories that have cast their magical spell over children and adults alike for generations.

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George Eliot’s last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who marries for money, the other concerning the mysterious hero of the title whose search for his true destiny leads him towards Zionism. All Eliot’s great themes – moral choice, the role of chance, the interaction of characters with their environment – are worked out with her incomparable power, and many readers have agreed with F. R. Leavis that the first section of the novel is the greatest achievement in English fiction.

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A luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. ByattWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELLMirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and travel from Ancient myth to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairytale palace. Driven by curiosity, Byatt takes her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary and the gloss of the fantastical, to a place rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable.'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful. Byatt is a vivid colourist' Sunday Times'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 'These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels... They are moving, thought-provoking, witty and shocking all at once' Sunday Telegraph

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Goethe's Faust reworks the late-medieval myth of Dr Faust, a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract or wager with the devil, Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seek to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last for ever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe's great work the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a life beyond his study and - in rejuvenated form - winning the love of the charming and beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire and self-delusion, Faust, served by the devil, heads inexorably towards destruction.

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This fascinating anthology introduces us to a wide range of arguments on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives, and our history, together. Arranged in themed sections, the book includes specially commissioned essays by the editors and by writers with expertise in different fields - from 'Memory and Evolution' by Patrick Bateson to 'Memory and Forgetting' by the biographer Richard Holmes, and an account of the chemistry of the brain by Steven Rose. Complementing the essays are a rich selection of extracts from writers and thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Montaigne and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami. Stimulating, provocative, funny or profoundly moving, Memory is a book to treasure - and remember.

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In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of 'das unheimliche', the uncanny. In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud's famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts...

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