Ann Patchett est une auteure américaine dont l'œuvre explore souvent les profondes complexités des liens humains et le concept de foyer. Son écriture se caractérise par une perspicacité aiguë de la psychologie des personnages et une profonde appréciation des nuances de la vie quotidienne, entraînant les lecteurs dans des mondes richement imaginés. L'engagement de Patchett envers la communauté littéraire et sa conviction du pouvoir de la narration sont évidents tout au long de sa carrière. Ses récits célèbrent la résilience et la recherche durable de sens et d'appartenance.
Scientifique et chercheuse pour une entreprise pharmaceutique du Minnesota, le Dr Marina Singh est envoyée au Brésil sur les traces de son ancien mentor, le Dr Annick Swenson. Celle-ci semble avoir totalement disparu dans la jungle amazonienne alors qu'elle travaillait sur un nouveau médicament d'une extrême importance (une pilule qui allongerait la fertilité de plusieurs années)... Variation moderne sur "Au coeur des ténèbres" de Conrad, "Anatomie de la stupeur" est un roman sombre et magnifique, où la beauté de l'inattendu côtoie l'abîme de la perte.
Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: essays that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Ranging from the personal - her portrait of the three men she called her fathers; unexpectedly falling into a life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks; how to answer when someone asks why you don't have children - to the sublime - exploring the Harvard Museum of Natural History before its doors open; the unexpected influence of Snoopy; the importance of knitting - each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew. Illuminating, penetrating, funny and generous, These Precious Days is joyful time spent in the company of one of our greatest living authors.
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.
Over the course of a single week, a woman who is ready to die discovers an unexpected reason to live.Following the deaths of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the English village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss.Helen retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit. Then, one cold autumn night, a chance encounter with an abandoned pet mouse on the street outside her house sets Helen on a surprising journey of friendship.Sipsworth is a reminder that there can be second chances. No matter what we have planned for ourselves, sometimes the world has plans of its own. Simon Van Booy’s lyrical storytelling is a delight even as it will fill your heart.
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto, examines her deepest commitments—to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband—creating a resonant portrait of a life in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore. As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.
Exuberant and affirming, it's funny and immensely clever, emotionally rare and strong. I feel bereft now I've finished' Tessa Hadley Casey has ended up back in Massachusetts after a devastating love affair. Her mother has just died and she is knocked sideways by grief and loneliness, moving between the restaurant where she waitresses for the Harvard elite and the rented shed she calls home. Her one constant is the novel she has been writing for six years, but at thirty-one she is in debt and directionless, and feels too old to be that way - it's strange, not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. And then, one evening, she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar walks into her restaurant, his two boys in tow. He is older, grieving the loss of his wife, and wrapped up in his own creativity. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, stuck between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures. Lily King's Writers & Lovers follows Casey in the last days of a long youth, a time when everything - her family, her work, her relationships - comes to a crisis. Hugely moving and impossibly funny, it is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. It is a novel about love and creativity, and ultimately it captures the moment when a woman becomes an artist.
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers. "Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." --The Guardian In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
By the author of The Magician's Assistant, the Orange Prize runner-up, this novel features the combinatin of opera and terrorism. Latin terrorists storm an international gathering, only to find that their intended target has failed to show up.
Rose, a beautiful and mysterious woman living at St. Elizabeth's home for unwed mother, has no intention of telling her mother or her husband about her pregnancy, until a healing spring near the home changes her mind.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly -- thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another. Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories
Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (A Back Bay Book)
256pages
9 heures de lecture
In this anthology, 26 writers illuminate the motivations at the heart of their creative lives in original essays that are as surprising and varied as their fiction. The contributors include Pat Conroy, Norman Mailor, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace.
Third - and breakthrough - novel by an acclaimed American writer with an
enchanting, quirky voice. `The Magician's Assistant' is at once a love story
and a brilliant portrayal of reinvention about a magician who dies leaving his
assistant/wife to discover he has lied about his past.
...masterful and affecting stories, essays, and poems by 36 writers profoundly attuned to the sources and implications of social rupture. These are sharply inquisitive and provocative works... - Booklist (starred review) Urgent, worthy reportage from our fractious, volatile social and cultural moment. - Kirkus
V Michiganu je třešňová sezóna. Lara a její tři dcery mají plné ruce práce. Ale… vlastně je všechno jinak. Maisie a Nell mají být na univerzitě a třešně mají česat námezdní dělníci. Jenže se píše rok 2020 a ve světě zuří první vlna pandemie covidu 19. Lara je ale šťastná, farmaje svět sám pro sebe a ona má nečekaně celou rodinu zase pohromadě. A při česání dcerám vypráví o jednom létě kdysi dávno, o létě, které strávila u divadelní společnosti u jezera Tom s pozdější hollywoodskou hvězdou Peterem Dukem. Jezero Tom je nenápadné vyprávění o velkých věcech. O zamilování, o lásce, o divadle i environmentálním žalu. A také je oslavou rodiny a místa - farmy v Michiganu, s třešňovým sadem a hřbitůvkem na kopci, kde jednou všichni skončí. Ann Patchettová je mistrná vypravěčka, napětí střídají emoce, nostalgii nečekané dějové zvraty. A jedno je jisté, všichni bychom chtěli být u jezera Tom. Anebo česat třešně. Lara zažila obojí.
Ann Patchett erzählt, wie sie 2011, nach der Schließung der letzten unabhängigen Buchhandlung in Nashville, entschied, selbst eine zu eröffnen: The Parnassus Bookshop. Ihr Werk ist ein kluges und wichtiges Plädoyer für den Erhalt des unabhängigen Buchhandels und des Lesens.