![]() At home he is besieged by a disastrous marriage to the frigid, manipulative Edith at the university he faces bitter rivalry with not one, but two sinister hunchbacks. He enters the University of Missouri in 1910, quickly changes his course of study from agriculture to literature, and stays at the university as an assistant professor until his death in 1956. ![]() ![]() Stoner tells the story of William Stoner, born 1891 in rural Missouri. Bret Easton Ellis referred to Stoner as “one of the great unheralded 20th-century novels.” Emma Straub called it “the most beautiful book in the world.” In perhaps the most effusive case, Morris Dickstein at The New York Times wrote, “‘Stoner’ is something rarer than a great novel-it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving that it takes your breath away.” The list goes on. If the novel has gone under-appreciated for most of its existence-and it has-one must also recognize the tremendous corrective effort taking place. Now Stoner has become a critical darling, praised by the likes of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. A French translation by Anna Gavalda gained enormous popularity across Europe, leading the novel to become a bestseller for the first time in its 40 year history. Stoner remained largely unnoticed until it was reissued in paperback in 2003, also by NYRB. The novel struggled to find a publisher, had an unimpressive initial run of 2,000 copies, and quickly receded from public view. 1 That Stoner endures at all, let alone in a fiftieth anniversary edition, is somewhat remarkable. A half century after publication, John Williams’ Stoner has been reissued in hardback by the New York Review of Books, accompanied by some 20 pages of correspondence between the author and his agent Marie Rodell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |