DIV DIVDIVA wonderful exploration into the maturation process across the course of human life/divDIV /div/divDIVLaid to waste by drink, Agathon, a seer, is a shell of a man. He sits imprisoned with his apprentice, Peeker, for his presumed involvement in a rebellion against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos. Confined to a cell, the men produce extraordinary writings that illustrate the stories of their lives and give witness to Agathon’s deterioration and the growth of Peeker from a bashful young apprentice to a self-assured and passionate seer./divDIV /divDIVCaptivating and imaginative, The Wreckage of Agathon is a tribute to author John Gardner’s passion for ancient storytelling and those universal themes that span the course of all human civilization./divDIV /divDIV /divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives./div /div

Introduces readers to the imagination of a popular & prolific American writer.

Vivid, compassionate, and often disturbing, this expansive novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.

At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story set in a small Catskill community in the 1950s: when, at forty-two, the obese, gentle, and anxious Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells -- who is pregnant with the child of a local boy -- it is much more than age that defines the gulf between them. The plot turns on tragic events -- they might be accidents or they might be acts of will -- involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself), and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt and innocence, and even murder, are ulitmately eclipsed by Henry Soame's quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague fo the author, has wirtten an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised and often misunderstood John Gardner.

The Book of Lost Books is a book of stories involving kings, heretics, untimely interruptions and back room deals, falling tortoises and fairy princesses, train crashes and war atrocities, bravery, cowardice, rent boys, chamber maids, love, quests, puzzles and a crocodile. From Homer to Jane Austen, Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, this is an account of books destroyed, misplaced, never finished, or never even begun. With academic shaggy dog stories, swashbuckling historical fables, wry ironies and imaginative fantasia, The Book of Lost Books is the perfect read for all bibliophiles. Hilarious, insightful, endlessly fascinating, sometimes shocking - The Book of Lost Books is a wonderfully quirky but utterly romantic saga of our love affair with books.

The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements.

Containing 250 entries, each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains examines the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. Much more than a 'Who's Who', each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements, and conclude with a fully annotated bibliography. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. Any student in the field will want to have one of these as a handy reference companion.

"The world is so sad and solemn," wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, "that things meant in jest are liable, by an overwhelming influence, to become dreadful earnest; gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." From the radical dualism of Hawthorne's vision, Samuel Coale argues, springs a continuing tradition in the American novel. In Hawthorne's Shadow is the first critical study to describe precisely the formal shape of Hawthorne's psychological romance and to explore his themes and images in relation to such contemporary writers as John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, and John Updike. When viewed from this perspective, certain writers—particularly Cheever, Mailer, Oates, and Gardner—appear in a new and very different light, leading to a considerable reevaluation of their achievement and their place in American fiction. Mr. Coale's long interviews and conversations with John Cheever, John Gardner, William Styron, and others have provided insights and perspectives that make this book particularly valuable to students of contemporary American literature. Coale links contemporary writers to an on-going American romantic tradition, represented by such earlier authors as Melville, Harold Frederic, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers. He explores the distinctly Manichean matter of much American romance, linking it to America's Puritan past and to the almost schizophrenic dynamics of American culture in general. Finally, he reexamines the post-modernist writers in light of Hawthorne's "shadow" and shows that, however similar they may be in some ways, they differ remarkably from the previous American romantic tradition.

This collection, selected from more than 140 interviews Gardner granted, presents a wealth of information on the life and art of one of America's foremost novelists. These interviews show him as a novelist, a charismatic teacher of creative writing, and a widely published scholar who has vast knowledge and who generated much literary information in his lectures and interviews. After the publication of such popular and critical successes as Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), this philosophical writer with an enviable talent for storytelling was regarded as ""a major contemporary writer."" After Gardner had demonstrated that he was one of America's most prolific, versatile, and imaginative authors, he became one of its most controversial when he attacked the literary establishment in his book On Moral Fiction and in his interviews. These candid conversations reveal a man of contrasts and contradictions, a writer who, as one of his interviewers remarks, ""brought to everything he did a passion that at times bordered on madness.