Quiet Dell: A Novel - Brossura

Phillips, Jayne Anne

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1439172544 ISBN 13: 9781439172544

Casa editrice: Scribner, 2014

Riassunto

A spectacularly riveting novel based on a real life crime by a con man who preyed on widows: “a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year” (Stephen King)—“thinkIn Cold Blood meets The Lovely Bones—but sexy” (People).

In Chicago in 1931, Asta Eicher, a lonely mother of three, is desperate for money after the sudden death of her husband. She begins to receive seductive letters from a chivalrous, elegant man named Harry Powers, who promises to cherish and protect her, ultimately to marry her and to care for her and her children. Weeks later, Asta and her three children are dead.

Emily Thornhill, one of the few women journalists in the Chicago press, wants to understand what happened to this beautiful family, particularly to the youngest child, Annabel, an enchanting girl with a precocious imagination and sense of magic. Determined, Emily travels to West Virginia to cover the murder trial and to investigate the story herself, accompanied by a charming and unconventional photographer equally drawn to the case. These heroic characters, driven by secrets of their own, will stop at nothing to ensure Powers is convicted.

A tragedy, a love story, and a tour de force of obsession, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Quiet Dell “hauntingly imagines the victims’ hopes, dreams, and terror” (O, The Oprah Magazine). It is a mesmerizing and deeply moving novel from one of America’s most celebrated writers.

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Recensione:

“[Quiet Dell’s] success is due to a bold decision: Ms. Phillips has written a serial killer novel in which the serial killer hardly appears....Unabashed...There is a glowing beauty to the book’s brave, generous version of history.” (Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal)

“Sometimes eerie and dreamlike, others grippingly tense, yet warmly human, always written with beauty and emotional power, Quiet Dell is a virtuoso performance by a highly original writer.” (Colette Bancroft Tampa Bay Times)

“Phillips’s effort to do justice — aesthetic and moral — to the victims feels bold and honorable...moving, even transporting...Phillips allows her own ample gifts to soar.” (Leah Hager Cohen Boston Globe)

“Compelling...Richly imagined...Phillips’s achievement is to reveal how intimately cruelty and kindness unfold.” (The New Yorker)

“An extraordinary achievement, a mesmerizing blend of fact and fiction that borrows from the historical record, including trial transcripts and newspaper accounts, but is cloaked in the shimmering language of a poet.” (Associated Press)

“Phillips’ extensive reporting—she quotes from newspaper stories, letters between Eicher and her ‘suitor’ and the trial transcript—gives the book its considerable heft. And her creation of a Chicago reporter named Emily Thornhill helps to frame the story of the eight-decade-old event in a fresh way. Quiet Dell is a smart combination of true crime, history and fiction tied together with Phillips’ seamlessly elegant writing....As the book proceeds to its dark conclusion, Emily offers readers a glimpse of light.” (Amy Driscoll Miami Herald)

“Phillips, an acclaimed writer of largely contemporary fiction, this time draws on history: a criminal case from the early '30s....But if the factual underpinnings of this latest novel are unusual for Phillips, her ability to transform them into a fictionalized narrative place her at the top of her form. Phillips has carefully inserted imagined private moments and just a few fictional characters to create a story both splendid and irreparably sad... As Phillips has proved throughout her decades of fiction writing, there is evil in the world, but there are some who will stand in its way.” (Celia McGee Chicago Tribune)

“In Quiet Dell, Phillips mesmerizingly spins together fact and fiction, vividly imagining the circumstances leading to their deaths, and sets a young female reporter on the case to solve it.” (Elissa Schappell Vanity Fair)

“Hauntingly imagines the victims’ hopes, dreams, and terror...Phillips blends fact and fiction in a darkly poetic way: The result is an absorbing novel that leaves us rooting for the heroine Emily becomes—and mourning the lives the Eichers never got to enjoy.” (Arianna Davis O, the Oprah Magazine)

“Jayne Anne Phillips’s unsettling latest, Quiet Dell, spins out from a true crime story involving a 1930s-era-seducer—think Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter—who preys on a widow and her children.” (Vogue)

L'autore:

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of Lark and Termite, Motherkind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and the widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets. A National Book Award and National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist, Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, where she established The Writers At Newark Reading Series. Information, essays and text source photographs on her fiction can be viewed at JayneAnnePhillips.com.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Scribner
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1439172544
• ISBN 13: 9781439172544
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 445