'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.' Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is both extraordinary and terrifying.
Ce volume explore cinquante ans d'histoire américaine au sein de la communauté juive de Newark, de l'avant-guerre aux années 1980, à travers une approche non chronologique. L'auteur aborde le mouvement de la contre-culture des années 1960, la guerre froide et la croisade anticommuniste des années 1950, ainsi que le politiquement correct des années 1970-1980. Il imagine également des années 1940 hypothétiques, marquées par la montée du fascisme et de l'antisémitisme aux États-Unis. À travers une critique acerbe de la société américaine, l'auteur analyse les mécanismes d'un individu confronté à l'imprévisible. Les personnages, face à des bouleversements majeurs, voient leurs destins se briser sous l'effondrement des illusions et des certitudes qui soutenaient leurs vies idéales, symboles du rêve américain. Quatre œuvres illustrent l'identité de l'individu pris dans la tyrannie des mythes américains, évoquant un avenir prometteur qui semblait découler d'un passé solide. Chaque génération, en dépassant les limitations des aînés, aspire à jouir pleinement des droits conférés par l'Amérique, à s'émanciper des anciennes obsessions et à vivre sans complexes parmi ses pairs.
From post-industrial Birmingham to the London riots and the current political
gridlock, [Middle England] takes in family, literature and love in a comedy
for our times Guardian
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century—has written a brilliant fictional portrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."
The story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.
There is no more decorated American writer living today than Philip Roth, the New York Times best-selling author of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and numerous other distinctions. The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
How bad is it when your SatNav is your last best friend? - In his sparkling
and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for
our time.
