E. L. Doctorow bol majstrom americkej fikcie, ktorého diela často pretkávali históriu s fikciou a skúmali americkú skúsenosť s pozoruhodnou hĺbkou. Jeho štýl sa vyznačoval plynulou prózou a prenikavým pohľadom na spoločenské a kultúrne sily formujúce americký život. Doctorowov prístup k písaniu spočíval v starostlivom skúmaní minulosti a jej oživovaní prostredníctvom silných postáv a pôsobivých naratívov. Jeho diela rezonujú s čitateľmi vďaka svojej literárnej zdatnosti a jeho schopnosti odhaliť podstatu amerického príbehu.
Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. As he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves.
A psychological tale recounts the experiences of Andrew, who confesses to an unknown recipient the memory- and truth-challenging events, loves, and tragedies that have led him to a mysterious act.
Brillante Erzählungen des Altmeisters der amerikanischen Gegenwartsliteratur Von »Ragtime« und »Billy Bathgate« über »Der Marsch« bis hin zu »Homer und Langley«: E. L. Doctorow gehört zu den ganz Großen der amerikanischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Seine hier gesammelten Erzählungen kreisen um Menschen, die außerhalb der Gesellschaft stehen oder sich im Konflikt mit ihrer Umgebung befinden und zeigen Doctorow in seiner ganzen Meisterschaft. Der Band versammelt sechs Glanzstücke aus Doctorows bisheriger Karriere als Meister der kurzen Form, sozusagen die Klassiker, und sechs bisher unveröffentlichte Erzählungen. Ein Mann verabschiedet sich am Ende eines ganz normalen Arbeitstages von seiner Upper-Middle-Class-Existenz und beginnt, in demselben wohlhabenden Vorort, in dem er mit seiner Familie lebte, zu betteln und zu plündern. Ein College-Absolvent nimmt aus einer Laune heraus einen Job als Tellerwäscher an und wird in kriminelle Machenschaften verwickelt, als er einer Scheinehe zustimmt. Die ohnehin komplizierte Beziehung eines Ehepaares verschärft sich, als ein Fremder in ihrem Haus auftaucht und behauptet, dort aufgewachsen zu sein. Ein Großstädter argwöhnt auf seiner morgendlichen Joggingrunde, dass die Stadt in der er lebt, über Nacht eine andere geworden ist. Diese brillante Mischung aus Geheimnis, Spannung und ethisch-moralischen Fragen zeichnet alle hier versammelten Erzählungen von Doctorow aus.
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World’s Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley , the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world”.A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family.A college graduate takes a dishwasher’s job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money.A husband and wife’s tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there.An urbanite out on his morning run suspects that the city in which he’s lived all his life has transmogrified into another city altogether.These are among the wide-ranging creations in this stunning collection, resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous Doctorow classics, All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel , World’s Fair , and The March , the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley , this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians...and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.
In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain--sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs, ideas for movies, obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age. But now he has found a story he thinks may become his next novel: The large brass cross that hung behind the altar of St. Timothy's, a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has disappeared...and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, on the Upper West Side. The church's maverick rector and the young woman rabbi who leads the synagogue are trying to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why. Befriending them, the novelist finds that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. Into his workbook go his taped interviews, insights, preliminary drafts...and as he joins the clerics in pursuit of the mystery, it broadens to implicate a large cast of vividly drawn characters--including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, filmmakers, and crooners--in what proves to be a quest for an authentic spirituality at the end of this tortured century. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, and filled with the sights and sounds of New York, this dazzlingly inventive masterwork emerges as the American novel readers have been thirsting for: a defining document of our times, a narrative of the twentieth century written for the twenty-first. From the Hardcover edition.