John Williams

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Featuring 16 pages of four-color movie photos and a pull-out souvenir poster, this movie selections folio is a tremendous value! Titles * The Chamber of Secrets * Dobby the House Elf * Family Portrait * Fawkes the Phoenix * Flying Car * Gilderoy Lockhart * Harry's Wondrous World * Hedwig's Theme * Moaning Myrtle * Nimbus 2000 * The Spiders.

A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs. A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.

After years of near invisibility in contemporary fiction, overshadowed by the acclaimed offerings from Scotland and Ireland, Wales can now draw on a brilliant and diverse group of writers, from Trezza Azzopardi to James Hawes, and Niall Griffiths to Anna Davis. "Wales Half Welsh" is a vibrant and original collection, whose subjects range from childhood trauma to hipster thrills, but all of them share a pervasive sense of a dark, edgy world. So here they are: eleven new writers from Wales--a place that's catching up with its own distinctive history.

Publicat pentru prima dată în 1948, Nimic, doar noaptea a marcat începutul favorabil al carierei lui John Williams ca romancier - o carieră ce a inclus ulterior clasicele Stoner și Augustus, câștigătorul National Book Award. În persoana lui Arthur Maxley, Williams investighează teroarea și capriciul unui bărbat care a suferit o experiență traumatică timpurie.

First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist—a career that would go on to include the classics Stoner and the National Book Award winning Augustus. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years. With rare economy and clarity, the story moves at an ever-increasing pace to its unforgettable end.

Необикновена книга за обикновения живот на едно момче, което тръгва от дълбоката американска провинция и се издига до университетски преподавател. В романа не се случва нищо. По-точно, случва се цял един живот, белязан от тихо отчаяние и неизчерпаеми запаси от достойнство. Стилът на Уилямс е пределно изчистен, аскетичен, оголен до мускула, в него няма и една излишна дума и това създава някаква особена съпричастност със съдбата на главния герой - Стоунър би могъл да бъде всеки от нас. Джон Уилямс (1922-1994) издава "Стоунър" преди близо половин век. Преди няколко години романът е преоткрит и заживява нов живот - включен е в авторитетната поредица на "Ню Йорк Ревю ъф Букс", а в Европа се превръща в голямата литературна сензация на 2013 година, когато оглавява класациите на най-продаваните книги в много страни.