Search results for ""Author John Irving""

'The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.'So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they 'dream on' in this funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.

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'According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then.' Jack Burns' mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist in search of the boy's father, a virtuoso organist named William who has fled America to Europe. To fund her journey, she plies her trade in the seaports of the Baltic coast. But her four-year-old son's errant father can't be found, and soon even Jack's memories of that perplexing time are called into question. It is only when he becomes a Hollywood actor in later life that what he has experienced in the past comes into telling play in his present......

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In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, pursued by the constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as a world 'where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.' From the novel's taut opening sentence to its elegiac final chapter, what distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice, the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

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This collection of short writing is a treat for John Irving addicts and the perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. In a spirited opening piece, John Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the past twenty years, inlcuding The Pension Grillparzer, previously only to be found inside The World According to Garp, and now given its first independent airing.

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'Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.'While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy...

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'One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole awoke to the sound of lovemaking - it was coming from her parents' bedroom.'This is the story of Ruth Cole. It is told in three parts: on Long Island, in the summer of 1958, when she is only four; in 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career; and in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's also about to fall in love for the first time...

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'A work of genius' Independent'Marvellously funny . . . What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' Spectator'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.'Summer, 1953. In the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, eleven-year-old John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany are playing in a Little League baseball game. When Owen hits a foul ball which kills John's mother, their lives are changed in an instant.It is dismissed as a tragic accident but Owen disagrees. He believes that he is God's instrument, put on Earth for a higher purpose. And as the boys come into adulthood to the background of the Vietnam War, a series of remarkable events show that perhaps Owen's divine plan was not imagined after all.Discover the funny yet poignant classic by the bestselling author of The World According to Garp.'So extraordinary, so original, and so enriching' Stephen King, The Washington Post'May justly join the classic American list' Anthony Burgess, Observer

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'The brown bears paced, brushing their thick coats against the bars; their heads swayed low to the ground, in rhythm with some ritual of stealth they were born knowing and pointlessly never forgot'It is 1967 and two Viennese university students decide to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. The eccentric duo, Graff and Siggy, embark on an adventure-filled motorbike tour of Austria as they prepare for "the great zoo bust." But their grand scheme will have both comic and gruesome consequences, as they are soon to find out...

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A masterpiece from one of the great contemporary American writers.'A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and heartbreaking...terrific' WASHINGTON POSTAnniversary edition with a new afterword from the author.A worldwide bestseller since its publication, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, struggling writer and illegitimate son of Jenny Fields - an unlikely feminist heroine ahead of her time.Beautifully written, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP is a powerfully compelling and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation.'A diamond sleeping in the dark, chipped out at last for our enrichment and delight...As approachable as it is brilliant' COSMOPOLITAN

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'The doctor was fated to go back to Bombay; he would keep returning again and again - if not forever, at least for as long as there were dwarves in the circus.'Born a Parsi in Bombay, sent to university and medical school in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen - a 59-year-old orthopaedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Once, twenty years ago, Dr Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, two decades later, the doctor will be reacquainted with the murderer...

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Fred 'Bogus' Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness. He also happens to have a complaint more serious than Portnoy's. Yet he stubbornly clings to the notion that he'll make something of his life, and is about to commit himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first.The Water-Method Man is a work of cosummate artistry and comic invention, bizarre imagery and sharp social and psychological observation.

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'The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud's so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer's intention to make St Cloud's his home.'Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend...

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Inspiring the global fight to revolutionize the way food is grown, distributed, and eaten. In the almost thirty years since Carlo Petrini began the Slow Food organization, he has been constantly engaged in the fight for food justice. Beginning first in his native Italy and then expanding all over the world, the movement has created a powerful force for change. The essential argument of this book is that food is an avenue towards freedom. This uplifting and humanistic message is straightforward: if people can feed themselves, they can be free. In other words, if people can regain control over access to their food-how it is produced, by whom, and how it is distributed-then that can lead to a greater empowerment in all channels of life. Whether in the Amazon jungle talking with tribal elders or on rice paddies in rural Indonesia, the author engages the reader through the excitement of his journeys and the passion of his mission. Here, Petrini reports upon some of the success stories that he has observed firsthand. From Chiapas to Puglia, Morocco to North Carolina, he has witnessed the many ways different peoples have dealt with food problems. This book allows us to learn from these case studies and lays out models for the future.

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John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years — a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time — among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

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Mozart's piano concertos stand alongside his operas and symphonies as his most frequently performed and best loved music. They have attracted the attention of generations of musicologists who have explored their manifold meanings from a variety of viewpoints. In this study, John Irving brings together the various strands of scholarship surrounding Mozart's concertos including analytical approaches, aspects of performance practice and issues of compositional genesis based on investigation of manuscript and early printed editions. Treating the concertos collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the first section of the book tackles broad thematic issues such as the role of the piano concerto in Mozart's quasi-freelance life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, the origin of his concertos in earlier traditions of concerto writing; eighteenth-century theoretical frameworks for the understanding of movement forms, subsequent historical shifts in the perception of the concerto's form, listening strategies and performance practices. This is followed by a 'documentary register' which proceeds through all 23 original works, drawing together information on the source materials. Accounts of the concertos' compositional genesis, early performance history and reception are also included here, drawing extensively on the Mozart family correspondence and other contemporary reports. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

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A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love — tormented, funny, and affecting — and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a ‘sexual suspect’, a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 — in his landmark novel of ‘terminal cases’, The World According to Garp.His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers — a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself ‘worthwhile’.

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John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years — a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time — among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

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A 2019 Italian BestsellerSurgically, but with wit, Francesco Filippi demolishes each and every myth that has taken root about Mussolini and fascism in an uplifting handbook for political and intellectual self-defense. No stones are left unturned, including the colonial devastation of Libya and Ethiopia.Legend would have it that Mussolini put roofs over Italians’ heads, developed the economy, had trains running on time, stood up for justice and against the mafia, protected the Jews from Nazi Germany, was a feminist, and put Italy on the map as a respected power. The founder of fascism’s only mistake was allying with Hitler.Though this is entirely false, it didn’t prevent Antonio Tahani, president of the European Union, from declaring in 2019 that “if we must be honest, he [Mussolini] did positive things to realize infrastructures … he reclaimed many parts of our Italy.” In fact, only 6 percent of the improvements referred to were done during the 21 years of fascist rule.Though written first for Italians, this book is relevant and timely for North Americans. Through a study of Mussolini and Italy, Filippi shows how such legends are built on webs of lie, manipulation of History, and constant uncontested repetition, explaining at the same time why so many people fall victim to the propaganda.

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