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When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams’s quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” The Man Who Wrote the Pe...
This is the first full biography of Charles Williams (1886-1945), an extraordinary and controversial figure who was a central member of the Inklings—the group of Oxford writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Charles Williams—novelist, poet, theologian, magician and guru—was the strangest, most multi-talented, and most controversial member of the group. He was a pioneering fantasy writer, who still has a cult following. C.S. Lewis thought his poems on King Arthur and the Holy Grail were among the best poetry of the twentieth century for 'the soaring and gorgeous novelty of their technique, and their profound wisdom'. But Williams was full of contradictions. An influential ...
Charles Williams was a writer of unusual genius. He had an ability to make theological matters not merely interesting to the lay person; but to make them appear, what they in fact are, matters of Life and Death.
A beautiful fraudster gives a drifter a chance at an irresistible score Jerry Forbes, on the run in Fort Lauderdale, is careful not to tell Marian Forsyth his real name. But Marian already knows his secrets. She’s been following him since Miami Beach, fascinated by this handsome drifter since the first time she heard his voice. Finally she tells him the truth: Together, they’re going to steal a fortune from a rich sap named Harris Chapman. The plan is simple—all they have to do is ask. Marian chose Jerry because he could be Chapman’s double. With a little coaching, he’ll be able to walk into the rich man’s bank and take whatever he likes. But it’s not long before the plan gets complicated, and Jerry is smart enough to know that when a heist turns sour, it’s not the women who die.
**NOW A MAJOR FILM** BY THE AUTHOR OF STONER Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living. In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.
In this provocative, classic metaphysical thriller, a group of suburban amateur actors plagued by personal demons and terrors explore the pathways to heaven and hell Certain inhabitants of Battle Hill, a small community on the outskirts of London, are preparing to mount a new play by the neighborhood’s most illustrious resident, the writer Peter Stanhope. Each actor struggles with self-absorption, doubt, fear, and sin. But “the Hill” is not like other places. Here the past and present intermingle, ghosts walk among the living, and reality is often clouded by dreams and the dark fantastic. For young Pauline Anstruther, who is caring for an aging grandmother and frightened by the specter...
Williams gives a contemporary setting to the traditional story of the Search for the Holy Grail. Examining the distinction between magic and religion, War in Heaven is an eerily disturbing book, one that graphically portrays a metaphysical journey filled with marvels and black magic, God and the Devil. "The telephone was ringing wildly," begins War in Heaven, "but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse." From this abrupt - and darkly humorous - start, Williams takes us on a 20th-century version of the Grail quest, with an Archdeacon, a Duke, and an editor playing the old Arthurian roles. Throughout, Williams reminds us that these legends were above all about divine, not just human, romance.
In War in Heaven Williams gives a contemporary setting to the traditional story of the Search for the Holy Grail. Examining the distinction between magic and religion, this eerily disturbing book graphically portrays a metaphysical journey through the shadowy crevices of the human mind. “Reading Charles Williams is an unforgettable experience.”—SATURDAY REVIEW “...one of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.”—TIME “Charles Williams’s firm conviction that the spiritual world is not simply a reality parallel with that of the material one, but is rather its source and its abiding infrastructure, is explicit in both the manner and ma...
This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read. 'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, Time William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life. 'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan 'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby INTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN