A collection of short stories including subjects as diverse as memories, marriage, insects and ghosts. A.S. Byatt's other books include "Possession", winner of the 1990 Booker Prize.
In this witty, Borges-like Novel, A. S. Byatt weaves a dazzling fictio n out of one man''s search for fact. Fed up with stultifying criticism , Phineas G. decides to study the messiness of ''real life''. Doing not hing by halves he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a ''whole life'' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected typescripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved. Phineas feels he is hunting shadows. Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. He meets others building wholes from bits and pieces: taxonomists, ecologists, even travel agents offering the trip of your dreams. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but which woman will guide him out of the labyrinth? Tantalising, comic and rueful, The Biographer''s Tale is a modern delight, a colour-filled novel of detection and desire.
Uno de los textos más apasionantes, lúcidos e inquietantes que nos ha brindado la literatura inglesa de las últimas décadas. 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 epoca, reivindicada en la actualidad por feministas y lesbianas. Si realmente existio una relacion entre ambos, ha hecho un descubrimiento que puede catapultar su carrera academica. Ayudado por una seductora especialista en la obra de la poetisa, seguira el rastro a traves de diversos documentos y reconstruira una historia de pasiones que encontrara su peculiar espejo en el presente.
They share a set of disturbing memories of a strange childhood game and of Simon, the handsome young neighbour who loved them both. Years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes and intrudes into their uneasy compromise of mutual antagonism and distrust.
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness." Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession--the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject--she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics--Roland Michell and Maud Bailey--as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
A. S. Byatt's Works Of Fiction Include "Possession", Winner Of The Booker Prize In 1990, The Sequence "The Virgin In The Garden, Still Life, And Babel Tower", And, Most Recently, "The Biographer's Tale". She Is Also The Author Of Several Important Critical Works And A Collection Of Essays, "Passions Of The Mind".
