A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversionher style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)
Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is paralysed by triviality, measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge partiesroutines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself.
First published in 1958, Daddys Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its feminine rage (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a mans world.
E. B. Whites greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly.
Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favorite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and lovebut his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behavior of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.
New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorkernative, adoptive, or far from homeand a perfect introduction, not only to what White called the inscrutable and lovely town, but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.
E. B. Whites greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly.Over more than fifty years at the
New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favorite city. His classic
Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and lovebut his was no fleeting infatuation. In
New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behavior of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.
New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorkernative, adoptive, or far from homeand a perfect introduction, not only to what White called the inscrutable and lovely town, but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.
