Portrait Of A Novel Henry James And The Making Of An American Masterpiece

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

Tóibín’s remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James’s well-known texts.

This book explores the life and times of Roméo LeBlanc, one of Canada's most popular and successful politicians and statesmen. Probably best known as the long-standing fisheries minister in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet from 1974 to 1982, LeBlanc's career spanned the golden era of Liberalism in Canada. He capped his career during the nineties as the country's twenty-fifth governor general. Historian Naomi E. S. Griffiths spent many years reading through LeBlanc's papers and interviewing many of his colleagues to explore the worlds he moved in -- Paris in the late forties and early fifties, world capitals during his time as a journalist, and then Ottawa. As a writer with an in-depth knowledge of the Acadian communities of the Maritimes, she knows his roots very well. Her biography covers his early years in New Brunswick where he was born into rural poverty, his years as a journalist in Ottawa, his heyday as a minister in Trudeau's cabinet, and his years at Rideau Hall. Along the way, Ms. Griffiths reveals many intriguing insights about her subject's contemporaries, including Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, and Jean Chrétien. She also discusses the importance of LeBlanc's Acadian heritage in animating all that he did. This engrossing biography illuinates the life of one of Canada's most beloved politicians and statesmen and, with it, a fascinating era in our history.

Henry James led a wandering life, which took him far from his native shores, but he continued to think of New York City, where his family had settled for several years during his childhood, as his hometown. Here Colm Tóibín, the author of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Master, a portrait of Henry James, brings together for the first time all the stories that James set in New York City. Written over the course of James’s career and ranging from the deliciously tart comedy of the early “An International Episode” to the surreal and haunted corridors of “The Jolly Corner,” and including “Washington Square,” the poignant novella considered by many (though not, as it happens, by the author himself) to be one of James’s finest achievements, the nine fictions gathered here reflect James’s varied talents and interests as well as the deep and abiding preoccupations of his imagination. And throughout the book, as Tóibín’s fascinating introduction demonstrates, we see James struggling to make sense of a city in whose rapidly changing outlines he discerned both much that he remembered and held dear as well as everything about America and its future that he dreaded most. Stories included: The Story of a Masterpiece A Most Extraordinary Case Crawford’s Consistency An International Episode The Impressions of a Cousin The Jolly Corner Washington Square Crapy Cornelia A Round of Visits

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea continues the story of Isabel Archer, the young protagonist of Henry James’s beloved The Portrait of a Lady—in this masterful novel of betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity. Eager but naïve, in James’s novel Isabel comes into a large, unforeseen inheritance and marries the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond. Here Banville imagines Isabel’s second chapter telling the story of a woman reawakened by grief and the knowledge that she has been grievously wronged, and determined to resume her quest for freedom and independence.

"A National Book Award-finalist biographer tells the story of how a young man in his 20s who had never written a novel turned out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than 70 years later and is considered a rite of passage for readers around the world, "--NoveList.