Blank Pages: And Other Stories
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- 13,99 $
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- 13,99 $
От издателя
A Library Journal Best Book of 2022 in Short Stories
"A deft and life-affirming collection by a master of the form.”—Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times
A collection of twelve powerful and moving new stories from one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers.
Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty’s Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit. In “A Love Picture,” a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a World War II newsreel to determine the fate of her son. “Blackthorns” tells of a poor, out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely savior. The harrowing but transcendent “The End of Days” imagines life in another pandemic as artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu, spend their final days together. And in the poignant title story, an elderly writer takes stock of what remains after losing his life partner.
Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty’s signature themes—domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging—with compassion and insight. A consummately gifted storyteller, MacLaverty uncovers the turbulent undertones of seemingly ordinary human interactions and explores endings of all kinds with tenderness, affection, and wry humor.
Acclaimed for his extraordinary emotional range and “telescopic observational powers” (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence in crystalline, precise prose. Each resonant story in Blank Pages reminds us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.
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The 12 stories in this poignant, understated collection by Irish author MacLaverty (Lamb) direct a keen and compassionate eye toward characters who are approaching death. The dreamy "Glasshouses" follows an unnamed old man who loses track of his grandchildren as they visit a large conservatory divided into various climate zones. He wanders alone and afraid, and possibly suffers a heart attack while "searching throughout the world" for the children he fears may have come to harm. In the touching "Sounds and Sweet Airs," an elderly couple takes a stormy ferry ride from Ireland to Scotland, during which they strike up a friendship with a young harp-toting woman named Lisa Boyd. Lisa brought the harp to play for her invalid father in Scotland, and after the couple persuades her to play it on board, it seems to calm both the sea and the anxious people on board. MacLaverty's tour de force is the heartbreaking "The End of Days: Vienna 1918," in which artist Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife are felled by influenza, with parallels to a more recent pandemic both clear and devastating. MacLaverty's tales come across as deceptively light at first, but they leave a lasting impression.