Getting a Life: Stories - Rilegato

Simpson, Helen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375411097 ISBN 13: 9780375411090

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Riassunto

Set against the backdrop of modern-day London, a collection of nine entertaining short stories captures the joys, tribulations, triumphs, and annoyances of domestic life as it explores the worlds of two female teachers exchanging drunken confidences at a small cafT, a teenage poetry lover who resolves to build a future far different from her career-oriented mother, and others. 12,500 first printing.

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Recensione:

"In these subtly linked stories, and with prose that in its range of cultural and sensual reference is breathtaking and beautiful, Helen Simpson registers what is both laughable and lamentable in the lives of contemporary women. In her take on fin de siecle motherhood and work, she has elegantly updated and complicated the mad housewife fiction of previous decades and offered a bracing post-script to Bridget Jones. These stories are wonderfully composed in their irony and wrath. They are admirable and haunting." --Lorrie Moore

"Ms. Simpson writes with such emotional precision, such black humor and dyspeptic zest, that she manages to spin this unpromising subject matter into some wonderfully funny and disturbing stories that limn the middle- and upper-middle-class world of London (and its suburbs) with Waugh-like acerbity and wit. Ms. Simpson [has a] seemingly effortless ability to conjure up her characters' states of mind, [and] to describe emotions and moods with pointillist if sometimes hyperbolic detail."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"...[B]rilliantly biting. [Her] terrain will remind readers of Fay Weldon's cursed and pleasant land, but Simpson's boil is more furious, her satire more surreal and Swiftian, her vision more end-of-tether violent. Simpson plants a surveillance camera inside darkest family life and describes the scenes with mordant comedy and lush, exact language...mesmerizing because of Simpson's precise observations of mood shifts and because of her extravagant unfurling of language."--Laurie Stone, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Some of the most sensitive, insightful and finely crafted stories I have ever read."
—Ruth Rendell, The Mail on Sunday

"It is the book's truthfulness that makes it both intensely tragic and intensely comic."
—A. S. Byatt

L'autore:

Helen Simpson grew up in a suburb of London. She is the author of two award-winning collections of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award) and Dear George, as well as one novel, Flesh and Grass. In 1993 she was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 1991 she was the first recipient of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375411097
• ISBN 13: 9780375411090
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 196