Jean Stafford Livres

For the first time, the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form, plus her fascinating portrait of the mother one of the world's most infamous assassins This volume collects for the first time the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form, a writer acclaimed for her acute psychological insight, exacting eye for detail, and mordant sensibility. Set in New England, Colorado, New York, and Europe, Jean Stafford’s stories intimately examine the lives of women and men beset by restlessness, dislocation, and isolation. “The Interior Castle” takes us inside an accident victim’s physical and mental pain; “A Country Love Story” chillingly depicts marital estrangement and mental breakdown amidst the solitude of a Maine winter; “Bad Characters” is the exuberant story of a young girl led into mischief by an incorrigible friend; and “An Influx of Poets” is a haunting story of a marriage wrecked by literary ambition and egotism. The volume also includes A Mother in History, Stafford’s controversial journalistic profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and three revealing literary essays.

The narrative explores the psychological unraveling of a woman as she grapples with societal expectations and her own internal struggles. Through sharp prose, Stafford delves into themes of identity and the complexities of personal and external pressures, showcasing the protagonist's descent into despair. This final novel captures the intricacies of the human experience, offering a profound commentary on the challenges faced by women in a demanding world.

Elephi Pelephi, a well-known, intelligent, but lonely cat, smuggles a small foreign car into his Fifth Avenue apartment hoping for friendship and stimulating conversation.

"Miss Stafford writes with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible. "--Saturday Review"Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. "--New YorkerComing of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion, Stafford uncovers and indicts the social forces that require boys to sacrifice the feminine in order to become men and doom intelligent girls who aren't pretty.

A provocative story of class struggle, privilege, and poverty that put American author Jean Stafford on the map. Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel, she keeps company with the austere and fascinating Miss Pride. Years pass, and Sonie—now the caretaker of her fragile mother—receives an invitation from Miss Pride to move to Beacon Hill and be her personal secretary. Salvation, she thinks, is at hand. In Boston, Sonie does come to know a new and broader world, one in which she mingles with both blue bloods and louche European refugees, and yet her troubles, she discovers, are hardly over. Boston Adventure was published when Jean Stafford was twenty-nine, and it was an immediate best seller. Combining Dickensian color and Proustian insight in its depiction of an isolated but determined young woman, it looks forward to Stafford’s celebrated novel The Mountain Lion as well as to the short stories for which she would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.

A memoir centered on the death of the author's husband forms a study on the joys and frustrations of their marriage, the passage of time, and how life and imagination influence each other.

Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ...

These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate whole lives but also convey with an elegant economy of words the sense of the place and time in which her protagonists find themselves. This volume also includes the acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form.

"Utterly compelling . . . Davis writes with a stunning brilliance, creating fractured worlds that are both extraordinary and routine." —The Boston Globe "A coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel . . . The world [Duplex] describes has gone cuckoo while its characters' anxieties remain stubbornly, drably, daringly familiar." —Tom Bissell, Harper's Magazine "Enchanting . . . Hums beautifully to its own rhythm. It's a series of dreamlike, often erotic, images and interconnected plot lines that . . . swell to create an intoxicating atmosphere." —Slate "For fans of the fantastical, Davis's writing style is a glass of ice-cold water in today's desert of conventional fiction." —Star Tribune (Minneapolis) "[I fell] in love with Davis's writing . . . I'm grateful for every word . . . When you are lost in the uncanny woods of this astonishing, double-hinged book, just keep reading, and remember to look up. Kathryn Davis knows right where you are." —Lynda Barry, The New York Times Book Review "Reading this book is a blast . . . Duplex is a traditional love story tucked inside an adult fairy tale, wrapped in science fiction . . . Thankfully, the laws of quantum mechanics do not power Duplex's magnetism. Instead, it is Davis's beautiful prose, her psychological awareness." —Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR, All Things Considered