Collected Novels and Plays

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Alfred A. Knopf, 2002 - 676 páginas
Following the widely celebrated "Collected Poems," this second volume in the series of James Merrill's works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form.
Merrill's first novel, "The Seraglio," is a daring "roman a clef" derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America's most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find "The (Diblos) Notebook," an experimental novel in which a young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill's plays, including the one-act comedy of manners "The Bait" and the Chekhovian" The Immortal Husband"--a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill's short play "The Birthday," a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic," The Changing Light atSandover."

Dentro del libro

Contenido

THE PLAYS
328
The Birthday 1947
425
The Bait 1953
453
Derechos de autor

Otras 3 secciones no mostradas

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Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (2002)

James Ingram Merrill 1926-1995 James Ingram Merrill was born in New York on March 3, 1926. He attended Amherst College. Merrill would go on to receive every major poetry award in the United States, including the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies. Merrill was honored in mid-career with the Bollingen Prize in 1973. He would receive the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. He won the National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1967 for Nights and Days and in 1979 for Mirabell: Books of Number. Merrill died on February 6, 1995. Since his death, his work has been anthologized in three divisions: Collected Poems, Collected Prose, and Collected Novels and Plays. J. D. McClatchy was born Joseph Donald McClatchy Jr. in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1945. He received a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University. He taught at Yale University and Princeton University. He was the editor of The Yale Review from 1991 until his retirement in 2017. He was a poet, editor, anthologist, translator, and critic. He wrote eight volumes of poetry including Scenes from Another Life, Stars Principal, Kilim, Ten Commandments, The Rest of the Way, Mercury Dressing, Hazmat, and Plundered Hearts. He edited the Library of America's 2007 volume Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. His volumes of criticism included White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry and Twenty Questions. His anthologies included Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems. His poems and essays appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review. He received two Lambda Literary Awards and Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. He was also the author of opera librettos. He died from cancer on April 10, 2018 at the age of 72. Stephen Yenser is Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles.

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