Search results for ""Author C. K. Stead""

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student.When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

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Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student.When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

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Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument - from The Bone People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer's flat. What was it like to be Allen Curnow's designated 'Critic across the Crescent'; or alternatively to be labelled 'the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit'? Covering Stead's travels from Los Angeles to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas and Colombia, as New Zealand poet laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers - and all in Stead's famously lucid 'story-telling' prose.

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In this poignant new poetry collection, one of New Zealand’s most significant voices reflects on home, on away, and on friends living and dead. ‘I lead a life of quiet medication’, the poet claims, ‘longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.’ But whether swimming to the yellow buoy or remembering an encounter in Belsize Park, in the thick of it or asking, ‘what next?’, Stead’s voice is intimate, amusing and always compelling. "This Side of Silence resounds with intimations of mortality, compounded with reactions to a contemporary world of pandemic, climate change and war, but this collection is not in the least morose. Rather, the poetry is enlivening – concrete, particular, detailed and often playful. There is a wealth of sensory content, and each poem has its own satisfying shape, with easy idiomatic speech forming its special kind of rhythm. In this book a major modern poet continues to “live and sing”." - MacDonald P. Jackson "Stead has his usual quick wit and steely eye for his world and, at 90, has the linguistic dexterity that many thousands of aspiring writers can only dream about." - Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers

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Gathered from throughout Stead's career, these stories are a reminder of his deft storytelling and literary power. They are clever, sensual, wry and beautifully written, with Stead's subtle sense of humour evident at every turn.The collection can be read as a meditation on the writerly life, and includes a number of new, previously unpublished stories, including Last Season's Man, which won the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, as well as older stories that have been revised and rewritten. Set in locations as diverse as the South of France, Sydney, Zagreb, Auckland, San Francisco and Oxford, each story is vividly drawn.This extraordinary collection, along with Stead's history as New Zealand Poet Laureate (2015-17), confirms his position as an exceptionally talented writer.

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