Word: tolstoys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nearly halfway through this first novel the heroine makes a passing reference to Anna Karenina. Her remark is no accident, for she belongs to a family that is unhappy in ways Tolstoy would understand. Her father, Sheridan Shields, is a doctor who practices in a lush, remote area of Hawaii. He was one of the first Americans allowed into Hiroshima after the Bomb; he left the flattened city with an infant Japanese boy whom he had delivered and an incurable case of moral numbness. His wife Anna tells him that "what you saw there became your definition of suffering...
There is not a false note in Short Shorts. The contents-38 fictions-range back to Leo Tolstoy's The Three Hermits, whose pious innocents forget a prayer and run on top of the ocean to find their condescending teacher. The most recent are powerful condensations of modern life by Heinrich Boll, who describes a professional laugher producing merriment on cue for everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other...
...Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy...
...Peace, by Leo Tolstoy...
...whet his analytical appetite, Edel proves to be a literary journalist of great skill. His chapter on Henry David Thoreau as Mamma's boy and great American freeloader is a model of concision and balance. So are his pieces on James Joyce as "injustice collector" and "unfinished genius," Tolstoy as a "prodigy of self-inhibitions" and "self-indulgence," Yeats as a hero of "creative aging," and T.S. Eliot as a successful battler against will-sapping depression...