A.S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie BloorByatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.Married1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.EducationSheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.Academic Honours:Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999PrizesThe PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFEThe Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSIONIrish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSIONThe Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSIONPremio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYEShakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;Publications:The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);The Game, 1967;Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);Iris Murdoch 1976The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);Still Life, 1985Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)Possession: a romance, 1990Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;Angels and Insects (novellas),1992The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);Babel Tower, 1996;New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;Portraits in Fiction, 2001;The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);A Whistling Woman, 2002Little
Possession
A.S. Byatt
Winner of England's Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
The Matisse Stories
A.S. Byatt
Three delightful stories inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and “a writer of dazzling inventiveness" ( Time ).
"[An] exquisite triptych.... Richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people." — People
These stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling—about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority.
"Full of delight and humor.... The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion." — San Francisco Chronicle
Ragnarök: The End of the Gods
A.S. Byatt
Booker Prize winner Dame Antonia Byatt breathes life into the Ragnorak myth, the story of the end of the gods in Norse mythology.
Ragnarok retells the finale of Norse mythology. A story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves: what more relevant myth could any modern writer choose? Just as Wagner used this dramatic and catastrophic struggle for the climax of his Ring Cycle, so AS Byatt now reinvents it in all its intensity and glory. As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods—a book of ancient Norse myths—and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
Ragnarok
A.S. Byatt
Recently evacuated to the British countryside and with World War Two raging around her, one young girl is struggling to make sense of her life. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Intensely autobigraphical and linguistically stunning, this book is a landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's truly great writers. Intensely timely it is a book about how stories can give us the courage to face our own demise. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of the Gods, plays out the endgame of Norse mythology. It is the myth in which the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats his own tail as he crushes the world and the seas boil with poison. It is only after such monstrous death and destruction that the world can begin anew. This epic struggle provided the fitting climax to Wagner's Ring Cycle and just as Wagner was inspired by Norse myth so Byatt has taken this remarkable finale and used it as the underpinning of this highly personal and politically charged retelling
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
A.S. Byatt
The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession breathes life into the Ragnorak myth through the novel of a young British girl during World War II.Ragnarok retells the finale of Norse a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. What more relevant myth could any modern writer choose? As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods--a book of ancient Norse myths--and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that A.S. Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark. A Globe and Mail Best Book "A gorgeous, brilliant, and significant performance." --Booklist, starred review "Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages--jewelled one minute, gory the next--a pleasure to get lost in." --The Telegraph
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories
A.S. Byatt
The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As A.S. Byatt renders this relationship with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable.The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all us to inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor.
The Children's Book
A.S. Byatt
A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.
But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.
Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. It is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.
The Virgin in the Garden (The Frederica Quartet, #1)
A.S. Byatt
A new play, the highlight of a magnificent local festival celebrating the coronation of Elizabeth II, brings together the young playwright and a brilliant but eccentric family whose personal dramas soon eclipse the entire production.
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (Oxford Books of Prose & Verse)
A.S. Byatt
From Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, through Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, right up to Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, and many others, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories encompasses comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque. Edited by noted novelist A. S. Byatt, the thirty-seven stories gathered here range from social realism to surreal fantasy, from rural poverty to war-blitzed London, from tales of the supernatural to precise delineations of the mundane, all unified by Byatts demanding criteria that the works be both startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative. For short story lovers and anyone unable to resist the enchantments of the English imagination, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories offers a wide array of unforgettable pleasures, now reissued with a fresh, contemporary feel.
Angels and Insects
A.S. Byatt
In these two “astonishing” novellas ( The New Yorker ), the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession returns to the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.
"At once quirky and deep, brimming with generosity, imagination, and intelligence." — The New Yorker
"delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality" — San Francisco Examiner
Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
A.S. Byatt
From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this richly imaginative story collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites--passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice--clash and converge.A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master colour and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artistic problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafted and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.
Ragnarök
A.S. Byatt
Lei «era una bambina magra, delicata, tutt'ossa, come un tritone, con capelli che sembravano fili di fumo illuminati dal sole». E c'era la guerra. L'aviazione tedesca bombardava Londra e i centri industriali. Gli abitanti delle città si rifugiavano in campagna. Come la bambina e sua madre, che per un paradosso del destino in campagna, pur essendo sposata, «può avere una vita della mente». Il padre è via, nei cieli dell'Africa, forse. Sua madre, a cui piacciono le parole, le regala un libro, Asgard e gli dèi, la storia del Ragnarök, la fine senza resurrezione degli dèi norreni. Il libro diventa una compagnia essenziale, la bambina lo legge ogni sera in un tenue spiraglio di luce, ammira il coraggio di Odino, si compiace degli inganni di Loki, si gode le sue avventure subacquee in compagnia della portentosa serpentessa sua figlia. Di giorno riflette su quelle storie, a cui non crede, ma che tuttavia «le si attorcigliavano nel cervello come fumo, ronzando come api scure dentro un alveare». L'aiutano a tenere a bada un'inconscia disperazione. Ha paura, paura che il padre non torni, paura di veder sparire il mondo che conosce. Legge anche i miti greci e le fiabe dei Grimm e di Andersen, ma perfezione e fantasia non le offrono appigli per fronteggiare un senso di disastro imminente. Gli dèi norreni invece vanno incontro al disastro, e in questo le appaiono terribilmente umani, cosí limitati e stupidi. Sanno che verrà il Ragnarök, ma non sono capaci di creare un mondo migliore. Cavalcano nei cieli con un fragore di zoccoli che si confonde con il ronzio degli aerei durante i raid. È un paesaggio di lupi, caverne e acque turbolente, di spettri e bellicosi inganni. In stridente contrasto con l'idillico paesaggio della campagna inglese. Non c'è salvezza nel mito norreno, ma proprio questo aiuta la bambina magra a sopravvivere, anzi, a vivere un'infanzia di pensieri intensi e di precocissime memorie, che sedimentano giorno per giorno traducendosi in un archivio interiore al quale attingerà nel corso della vita. I pensieri e le visioni di cui A. S. Byatt da sempre dissemina i suoi romanzi trovano qui la loro unità, strutturandosi nella narrazione fluida e immaginifica di anni di caos. C'era la guerra - ma da allora ce n'è sempre stata una - e quel caos primordiale appare piú terapeutico di ogni credenza consolatoria.
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
A.S. Byatt
A stunning collection of fairy tales for grown-ups from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession, a "storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). Includes the story “The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye”—the basis for the George Miller film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda SwintonA.S. Byatt portrays the strange relationship between an intelligent heroine—a world-renowned scholar of the art of storytelling—and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As Byatt renders the relationship between the woman and the being with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable.The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor.
Riivaus romanttinen kertonen
A.S. Byatt
A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic.
A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.
Ragnarök: Jumalten tuho
A.S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt tulkitsee romaanissaan skandinaavisia jumalmyyttejä vaikuttavasti saaden lukijan pohtimaan, onko Ragnarök, viimeinen taistelu, jo lähellä.
Toisen maailmansodan aikana pieni tyttö on evakossa Englannin maaseudulla. Hän löytää kirjan, joka sisältää skandinaavisen mytologian jumaltaruja. Myyteissä maailma syntyy jättiläisen ruumiista ja loppuu taisteluun, jossa jumalatkin kuolevat.
Booker-voittaja A. S. Byattin skandinaavisten myyttien uudelleentulkinta hurmaa kerronnallaan. Tarustojen jumalat ja pienen tytön kokemukset toisesta maailmansodasta vertautuvat toisiinsa. Kun lukija peilaa teosta tähän hetkeen, ajaton, vuosisatoja vanha tarina tuntuu jopa pelottavan ajankohtaiselta.
Ragnarök: O fim dos deuses
A.S. Byatt
Ragnarök, em islandês antigo, significa 'crepúsculo dos deuses', ou ainda, 'julgamento dos deuses'. Ambas as acepções estão contidas nas sagas mitológicas germânicas e escandinavas compiladas a partir do século XIII. Para os antigos nórdicos, o fim dos deuses era também o fim dos tempos, comparável ao Juízo Final dos cristãos, com a importante diferença de que não havia esperanças de uma vida além-túmulo - após o colapso do Valhall - o suntuoso palácio das divindades -, o universo se transformará para sempre num lugar escuro, árido e desabitado. Neste livro híbrido entre mitologia e autobiografia, A. S. Byatt recupera algumas das mais importantes histórias sobre a gênese e o fim do mundo segundo os povos bárbaros - vikings, islandeses, germanos - que habitaram o norte da Europa até sua cristianização. Encantada desde a infância por deuses como Odin, Frigg, Loki e Thor, a autora reconta suas aventuras em meio a gigantes, elfos, lobos e serpentes monstruosas; paralelamente, Byatt rememora suas próprias experiências durante a primeira leitura das narrativas de que esses seres fantásticos são protagonistas. Ostentando poderes prodigiosos, equiparados às forças incontroláveis da natureza, mas também às fragilidades mais típicas dos homens, as divindades do panteão nórdico provocam seu próprio fim com suas paixões imprudentes. Trata-se de um eloquente eco das catástrofes humanas e naturais anunciadas pela atual degradação ambiental e pela escalada dos conflitos bélicos.
Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories
A.S. Byatt
A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas
Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.
Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary--even beyond the gloss of the fantastical--to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.
Posesión
A.S. Byatt
Un oscuro graduado en literatura inglesa descubre dos cartas inconclusas y nunca enviadas del eminente victoriano Randolph Henry Ash, cuya destinataria era una mujer que posiblemente fuese su amante. La mujer es Christabel LaMotte, oscura y ambigua poetisa de la época, reivindicada en la actualidad por feministas y lesbianas. Si realmente existió una relación entre ambos, ha hecho un descubrimiento que puede catapultar su carrera académica. Ayudado por una seductora especialista en la obra de la poetisa, seguirá el rastro a través de diversos documentos y reconstruirá una historia de pasiones que encontrará su peculiar espejo en el presente.
Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories from the Booker Prize Winner
A.S. Byatt
Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.
Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and travel from Ancient myth to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairytale palace.
Driven by curiosity, Byatt takes her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary and the gloss of the fantastical, to a place rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable.
Posession : A Romance
A.S. Byatt
Winner of England's Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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