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This critical analysis of Price's writings traces the development of an esteemed American writer, from the 1962 publication A Long and Happy Life. Demonstrating how literary trends have often run counter to Price's career, Schiff argues that Price has remained committed to a personal vision.
Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In "A Whole New Life," however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life. Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means "all)" doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." "A Whole New Life" offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honestinsight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.
Originally published in hardcover in 2012.
While recalling a childhood spent in the North Carolina countryside--the same landscape that has served as the setting for most of his many beloved novels--Reynolds Price shares powerful stories of the friends and family who helped shape his life into the man, and the writer, he is today.
In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man's return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival -- and his death -- has on his family. Wade Mayfield's parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.
Here, in a single volume for the first time, is the trilogy of novels in which Reynolds Price traces the paths of two families, the Mayfields and the Kendals, through nearly two centuries of American history -- the oldest character is born in 1815; the youngest in 1985. Though their aims and wanderings carry some of them to distant states and as far afield as Europe, both families are rooted in North Carolina and Virginia; and their eventually joined lives are enhanced and deeply shadowed by the racial complexities of their world. No other narrative has portrayed that entanglement -- nor the gifts and ravages of sexual hunger and family life -- more honestly and compellingly than A Great Circle.The narrative energy of the trilogy arises, however, simply from the dozens of men, women, and children whose memorable contentments, failures, and sacrifices weave a story that is as persuasive as any human drama. It is also the secret history of a nation in crisis -- from the becalmed aftermath of the Civil War, through the Great Depression and the wars of the twentieth century, to the struggles for racial and sexual equality, the devastations of the AIDS plague, the poised hopes of the third millennium, and a great deal more. In the final richness of its texture, it offers the joy implicit in all steady views of the world. The critic Michael Kreyling has said, Trilogies produced by American novelists in [the twentieth century] can scarcely match A Great Circle's sweep and finesse. Any reader in search of the ancient pleasures of wit and laughter, tragedy and recompense, and the healing surprises of pattern and harmony inherent in the broader reaches of narrative will find plentiful reward in a story which literally answers to all the meanings of the old word saga.This combined edition contains a new preface by the author, a family tree, and an annotated list of major characters.
An anthology by one of America's most distinguished writers features fifty short stories, including selections from two prior collections--The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors--as well as more than two dozen newer tales. Reprint.
Understanding Existentialism provides an accessible introduction to existentialism by examining the major themes in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. Paying particular attention to the key texts, Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Phenomenology of Perception, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, the book explores the shared concerns and the disagreements between these major thinkers. The fundamental existential themes examined include: freedom; death, finitude and mortality; phenomenological experiences and 'moods', such as anguish, angst, nausea, boredom, and fear; an emphasis upon authenticity and responsibility as well as the denigration of their opposites (inauthenticity and Bad Faith); a pessimism concerning the tendency of individuals to become lost in the crowd and even a pessimism about human relations more generally; and a rejection of any external determination of morality or value. Finally, the book assesses the influence of these philosophers on poststructuralism, arguing that existentialism remains an extraordinarily productive school of thought.
Since the publication of his famous first novel, A Long and Happy Life, Price has been accorded the praise and admiration reserved for America's most distinguished writers. Now he has written the most searching, most passionate novel of his rich and varied career. Blue Calhoun, the narrator, looks back over his past, from the mid-1950s to the present.
0ne of the most feisty, spellbinding and engaging heroines in modern fiction captures the essence of her own life in this contemporary American odyssey born of red-clay land and small-town people. We meet Kate at a crucial moment in middle age when she begins to yearn to see the son she abandoned when she was seventeen. But if she decides to seek him, will he understand her? Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kate Vaiden is a penetrating psychological portrait of an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, a story as joyous, tragic, comic and compelling as life itself.