E. L. Doctorow Libri

Una mattina piovosa a New York, nel 1871. Il giovane Martin Pemberton rimane colpito da un omnibus a cavalli che porta un gruppo di anziani signori, tutti vestiti di nero, gli sguardi persi nel vuoto, le teste ciondolanti. Tra quei passeggeri a Martin sembra di riconoscere il proprio padre, che credeva morto da anni. Nel tentativo di rintracciare il veicolo e ritrovare quel genitore nemico che un tempo aveva rifiutato, Pemberton attraversa tutti gli strati della contraddittoria New York di fine Ottocento, assediata dalla miseria, devastata dalla guerra di Secessione da poco conclusa, ma già lanciata verso il nuovo secolo. Il giovane scopre a proprie spese che anche le vie illuminate dai recentissimi lampioni a gas, il telegrafo, i giornali che invadono la città, tutta la luccicante vernice della modernità nascondono di fatto una cupa congiura animata dagli istinti e dalle pulsioni più primitive, mentre il lettore rimane a domandarsi fino a quale punto di abiezione ci si possa spingere in nome della scienza e del progresso.

Considerata l'opera narrativa più sconvolgente sugli orrori della guerra E Johnny prese il fucile è un romanzo in cui viene descritta, e per così dire materializzata, la condizione di 'torso umano' del soldato Johnny: di un soldato che sopravvive grazie a un prodigio della chirurgia alle mutilazioni subite in guerra. La mente è l'unica cosa che gli è rimasta: Johnny rievoca il suo passato, le prime esperienze, l'amore, l'amicizia, e la superficialità con cui una guerra senza chiari motivi può travolgere gli individui, trascinandoli in un irresponsabile e complice stato di incoscienza. Uscito negli Stati Uniti nel 1939 E Johnny prese il fucile è romanzo di pacifismo integrale (Trumbo ne trasse una sceneggiatura per un film che diresse egli stesso nel 1971, e che fu tra i prediletti di François Truffaut), e la voce di Johnny tutt'ora intatta - come scrive Goffredo Fofi - è quella di un Lazzaro indomito e sarcastico: "Cantate cantate forte per me i vostri alleluia tutti i vostri alleluia per me perché io conosco la verità e voi no sciocchi. Sciocchi sciocchi sciocchi."

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This stunning collection of 28 stories brings readers a literary portrait of the American family from 1894 to today. A collection of works that captures the essence of American families from living together and apart to loving and letting go.Regret / Kate Chopin --The lombardy poplar / Mary Wilkins Freeman --The widow's might / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --Old Rogaum and his Theresa / Theodore Dreiser --The sorrows of gin / John Cheever --I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen --Simple and Counsin F.D. Roosevelt Brown / Langston Hughes --The sky is gray / Ernest J. Gaines --My Coney Island uncle / Harvey Swados --My son the murderer / Bernard Malamud --Final dwarf / Henry Roth --And Sarah laughed / Joanne Greenberg --Wedding day / Roberta Silman --The legacy of Beau Kremel / Stephen Wolf --Kiswana Brown / Gloria Naylor --Tuesdays / Mary Hedin --Afloat / Ann Beattie --Winterblossom garden / David Low --Old things / Bobbie Ann Mason --Starlight / Marian Thurm --The writer in the family / E.L. Doctorow --The rich brother / Tobias Wolff --My legacy / Don Zacharia --Violation / Mary Gordon --Appropriate affect / Sue Miller --What I did for love / Lynne Sharon Schwartz --Still of some use / John Updike --Elephant / Raymond Carver

During the Great Depression of the '30s, a passionate, young New Jersey man leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds is a life so different from his own that it changes his destiny. A haunting story of dreams and desires, repackaged to match Doctorow's other bestsellers. Reprint from Bantam. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Relates the interrelated early twentieth-century lives of the families of a New Rochelle manufacturer, an immigrant socialist, and a Harlem musician and their involvements with Evelyn Nesbit, Henry Ford, Houdini, Morgan, Dreiser, Freud, Zapata, and otherp

E. L. Doctorow's debut novel presents a powerful allegory of frontier life, exploring the struggles and complexities of the human experience in a harsh landscape. This work lays the groundwork for the themes and narrative style that would characterize his later acclaimed novels, offering readers a glimpse into the challenges and resilience of individuals in a formative period of American history.

While Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of his parents' lives, and is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, he is also haunted. A fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, this is a tale of martyrdom and the search for meaning.

Edgar, nine, and his family have difficult times, but Edgar wins tickets for them to attend the New York World's Fair of 1939.

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.

This collection is a companion to the long-established and highly successful Modern Short Stories One and its essential aims are the same: to offer stories of high literary quality which, though written for adults, can be enjoyed and appreciated by adolescents. The fifteen stories included are by distinguished writers from Africa, America, Australia, India, Ireland, Italy and Great Britain; and within their artistic context several of them deal with the special personal and social concerns of society today.The collection includes stories by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Maeve Binchy, Garrison Keillor, Peter Carey, Flannery O'Connor and Nadine Gordimer.

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.

E. L. Doctorow's novels, from Ragtime to The March, showcase his remarkable contributions to modern American fiction. In his latest work, he presents the lives of brothers Homer and Langley Collyer, who live as recluses in their once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion. Homer, blind yet deeply intuitive, contrasts with Langley, whose psyche has been shattered by mustard gas from World War I. They scavenge the streets for items they deem useful, hoarding newspapers for Langley’s ambitious project of a dateless newspaper that aims to report news as prophecy. Despite their desire to retreat from the world, the tumultuous events of the century—wars, political upheavals, and technological advancements—intrude upon their lives. Their cluttered home becomes a stage for encounters with a diverse array of characters, including immigrants, society women, and gangsters, creating a rich tapestry of experiences. As they navigate their odyssey filled with peril, they seek to find meaning in their existence. This beautifully crafted narrative offers a mythic resonance, presenting a family story that stands out as an astonishing masterwork from this esteemed author.

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.

CITY OF GOD begins in mystery: the large brass cross behind the altar of St. Timothy's 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 young rabbinical couple who lead the synagogue set about attempting to learn who the vandals are who have committed this strange double act of desecration and to what purpose, but their joint clerical investigation only deepens the mystery. A writer alerted to the story by a newspaper article befriends the priest and the rabbis and find that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. In fact, as the narrative advances and the story broadens, more and more people are implicated in what may be the elusive prophecy of a new American culture. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, the book opens into a multi-voiced narrative that incorporates the monumental historical events and predominating ideas of our age.

A dazzling collection of short works crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E.L. Doctorow is famous

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow wurde am 6. Januar 1931 in New York City geboren und wuchs in der Bronx auf. Er besuchte verschiedene Schulen, darunter die Bronx High School of Science, und studierte Philosophie am Kenyon College sowie Englisches Drama an der Columbia University. 1953 heiratete er die Schauspielstudentin Helen Setzer und hatte mit ihr drei Kinder. Nach seinem Militärdienst arbeitete er als Redakteur in einer Filmproduktionsfirma und als Lektor in verschiedenen Verlagen. Neben seiner Schriftstellerkarriere unterrichtete er an mehreren Universitäten, darunter Princeton und die New York University. Doctorow war Mitglied der American Academy und des National Institute of Arts and Letters. Er verstarb am 21. Juli 2015. Als einer der erfolgreichsten US-amerikanischen Schriftsteller erhielt Doctorow zahlreiche Auszeichnungen, darunter den National Book Award und den PEN/Faulkner Award. Sein literarisches Debüt gab er mit einem von Kafka inspirierten Werk in der Literaturzeitschrift seiner Schule. Sein erster Roman, "Willkommen in Hard Times", wurde 1960 veröffentlicht. Ab 1969 widmete er sich vollständig dem Schreiben und verfasste bedeutende Romane, die oft die amerikanische Geschichte, insbesondere New York City, thematisieren. Zu seinen bekanntesten Werken zählen "Ragtime" und "Das Buch Daniel". Doctorows Werke sind geprägt von alltäglichen Beobachtungen und ethischen Fragen, oft untermalt von Jazzklängen.

Po úspešnom románe amerického spisovateľa E. L. Doctorowa Ragtime (1975) sa slovenský čitateľ stretáva s jeho ďalším dielom Jazero potáplic. Príbeh sa odohráva v krízových tridsiatych rokoch. Hrdina románu Joe je inteligentný, ctižiadostivý chlapec s dobrodružnými sklonmi. Pochádza z chudobnej robotníckej rodiny. Zhnusený duševnou i hmotnou biedou svojho okolia, ubíjajúcim prostredím i bezperspektívnou budúcnosťou uteká z domu, aby sa na vlastnej koži presvedčil o tom, že Amerika je krajina neobmedzených možností. Román má náročnú kompozíciu: preplietajú sa v ňom dve dejové línie v rôznych časových rovinách. Drsné naturalistické scény sa striedajú s poetickými pasážami, s intímnymi osobnými výpoveďami jednotlivých hrdinov. Integrálnu súčasť románu tvoria i akési voľné verše s kusými autobiografickými údajmi. Autor využíva strhujúci rytmus a prekvapujúce obrazy, mení osobu rozprávača. Román Jazero potáplic je zrelým majstrovským dielom, prinášajúcim pútavý obraz života Ameriky medzi dvoma svetovými vojnami. Doctorow sa profesionálne zaoberá literatúrou, prednáša na Princetonskej univerzite.

Příběh z Divokého západu se odehrává v poslední čtvrtině minulého století a patří do řady "hořkých" westernů. Odehrává se v malém, teprve vznikajícím městečku v dobách vrcholící zlaté horečky. Starosta města a zároveň vypravěč je svědkem událostí začínajících vpádem zabijáka, který za sebou zanechává jen vypálené trosky. Z původních obyvatel zůstávají jen 4 lidé, starosta se však ze všech sil snaží, aby se město znovu zalidnilo, bez ohledu na překážky nesobecky pomáhá všem kolem sebe. V okamžiku, kdy se zdá, že jeho sen se začíná splňovat a obyvatelé doufají v budoucí prosperitu, podléhá město (tentokrát definitivně) dalšímu nájezdu.