Stoner (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – June 20, 2006 by John Williams

Description

Author: John Williams

Brand: NYRB Classics

Color: Black

Features:

• New York Review of Books

Package Dimensions: 17x201x309

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 20-06-2006

Details: Product Description
Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
From Publishers Weekly
This reprint of Williams’s remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose. Sent by his hard-scrabble farmer father to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, William Stoner is sidetracked by an obsessive love of literature and stimulated by a curmudgeonly old professor, Archer Sloane. Sloane helps Stoner avoid service in WWI, and Stoner eventually becomes an assistant professor. He then meets and marries a St. Louis beauty, Edith, who quickly subjugates her contemplative, passive husband. As decades pass, Stoner entrenches himself deep into the life of the mind, developing into a master teacher but never finding solace in the outside world. Stoner’s single joy is Grace, their daughter, whom Edith appropriates as a weapon in her very personal war against Stoner’s quest for inner peace. Williams (1922–1994) won the NBA for
Augustus (1973), and NYRB will republish his western,
Butch’s Crossing next year. Williams’s prose flows in a smooth, efficient current that demands contemplation.
(July)
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Review
“A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life…I’m amazed a novel this good escaped general attention for so long.”  —Ian McEwan

“One of the great unheralded 20th-century American novels …Almost perfect.” —Bret Easton Ellis

“
Stoner is a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer.” —Ruth Rendell

“A beautiful and moving novel, as sweeping, intimate, and mysterious as life itself.” —Geoff Dyer

“I have read few novels as deep and as clear as
Stoner. It deserves to be called a quiet classic of American literature.” —Chad Harbach

“The most beautiful book in the world.”  —Emma Straub

“A poignant campus novel from the mid-’60s—an unjustly neglected gem.” —Nick Hornby,
People

“The book begins boldly with a mention of Stoner’s death, and a nod to his profound averageness: ‘Few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.’ By the end, though, Williams has made Stoner’s disappointing life into such a deep and honest portrait, so unsoftened and unromanticized, that it’s quietly breathtaking.”—
The Boston Globe

“Williams’ descriptions of the experience of reading both elucidate and evince the pleasures of literary language; the ‘minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words’ in which Stoner finds joy are re-enacted in Williams’ own perfect fusion of words.”—
n+1

“
Stoner, by John Williams, is a slim novel, and not a particularly joyous one. But it is so quietly beautiful and moving, so precisely constructed, that you want