Robin Jacques Books

The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town on the early nineteenth century.

"The Portrait of a Lady" is the most stunning achievement of Henry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he was transforming himself from a talented young American into a resident of Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatest novelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of this transformation informs every page of this masterpiece. Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characters with whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, between whom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom she must do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggests dazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England and Italy--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always remaining crucial to the larger drama.

Gathers a variety of tongue twisters and humorous poems about history, religion, politics, mathematics, psychology, and sex.

"James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is one of the twentieth century's great coming-of-age novels. This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Walter Gabler's acclaimed text and is accompanied by his introduction and textual notes. John Paul Riquelme provides explanatory notes to deepen the reader's appreciation for Joyce's masterpiece." ""Backgrounds and Contexts" is topically organized: "Political Nationalism: Irish History, 1798-1916," "The Irish Literary and Cultural Revival," "Religion," and "Aesthetic Backgrounds." Fourteen illustrations accompany the documents." ""Criticism" begins with John Paul Riquelme's overview of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man's structure. Twelve diverse interpretations of his work follow, by Kenneth Burke, Umberto Eco, Hugh Kenner, Helene Cixous, John Paul Riquelme, Karen Lawrence, Maud Ellmann, Bonnie Kime Scott, Joseph Valente, Marian Eide, Pericles Lewis, adn Jonathan Mulrooney. A Selected Bibliography is also included."--BOOK JACKET.

"Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own." —James Joyce, in a letter to his brother With these fifteen stories James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative places it had never been before.