Cara Massimina

Bored and broke, Morris Duckworth, an English teacher in Verona, stumbles on a plan for financial salvation – to marry Massimina, one of his lovelier students. And if his intentions are frustrated by a suspicious, conservative family, is it any fault of his that the girl chooses to elope? Obsessed by self-advancement and excitement, Morris’s dreams of blackmail, theft and murder plunge him deep into a chilling nightmare of deception and violence.

"Fenwick reckons with Parks's full literary range, from his novels and nonfiction books to his translations and journalism, and sheds light on the work of a versatile English writer whose international recognition is steadily growing."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents a collection of twelve interviews with eminent English contemporary writers held during a period of four years. The book allows an illuminating insight into a very lively and thought-provoking literary culture, stirred not only by recent ideas of postmodernism but also by the manifold issues of nationality, culture, and gender subjected to permanent redefinitions towards the end of the twentieth century. The interviews with Peter Ackroyd, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Alain de Botton, Maureen Duffy, Tibor Fischer, John Fowles, Romesh Gunesekera, Tim Parks, Terry Pratchett, Jane Rogers, and Adam Thorpe cover topics such as the relationship between writer and public, the role of the literary tradition, the relevance of contemporary literary theory for the production of literature, images of nationality, intertextuality, changes in the attitude towards language and meaning, and the reception of literary texts by critical reviewers and literary critics.

Bored and broke, Morris Duckworth, an English teacher in Verona, stumbles on a plan for financial salvation – to marry Massimina, one of his lovelier students. And if his intentions are frustrated by a suspicious, conservative family, is it any fault of his that the girl chooses to elope? Obsessed by self-advancement and excitement, Morris’s dreams of blackmail, theft and murder plunge him deep into a chilling nightmare of deception and violence.

'The novel: a survival skill' offers a completely new account of the relationship between writer, text, and reader. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology and positioning theory, Parks suggests that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told, and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy of suvival that the novelist has developed in reaponse to tensions within his or her family of origin. Radically undermining traditional lit-crit criteria, and deconstructing the pieties with which the novel is usually defended, Parks gives a novelist's own insider account of what may be best understood as the biography of the act of writing itself and its relation to the lives with which it is entwined.

A comic thriller about an English teacher, a vapid heiress, & the feigned kidnapping that goes awry.