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The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
 Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0805078061 |
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From Publishers Weekly
A year after WWII ended, Fox, then 22, left New York City for Europe, where she found work as a stringer for a small British news service. Those who haven't read her previous memoir, Borrowed Finery, will be curious about the reasons for her desperation to escape New York, but they'll quickly forgive the omission. In sparse, careful prose, Fox relates her experiences in London, Paris, Prague, Warsaw and Spain in 1946. Her writing style is detached, often sparing details (e.g., "We fell in love," she states simply of her brief relationship with a Frenchman). Her assessments, even of herself, are refreshingly frank: "I was too young and too dumb to worry about entering a fascist country; what I was apprehensive about were my meager funds." In her most moving chapter, "Children of the Tatras," Fox visits an... |
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Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love |
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| Author: |
Linda Carroll |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0385512473 |
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From Publishers Weekly
Carroll, a writer and therapist, bore quite a cross in rearing her fiery, unstable daughter, the rock icon who sets this memoir in motion by trumpeting her pregnancy. Fearing a "curse of the firstborn daughter," Carroll is seized with the urge to seek her own biological mother and mend a tattered matrilineal line. She discloses her past with a sprawling account of Catholic schools, friendships, romances and pregnancies in 1960s San Francisco, in prose mired with detail but often wry and touching. Carroll's social-climbing adoptive parents seem at best ambivalent, at worst cruel. In 1993, after Courtney's rise to fame and stormy estrangement from Carroll, the author finds her biological mother: Paula Fox, the acclaimed children's author who became pregnant as an abandoned teen. The two are kindred spirits, and... |
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Paula Fox |
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| Author: |
Susanna Daniel |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0823945251 |
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Slave Dancer |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0440404029 |
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From AudioFile
In a tale at once fascinating and horrible, young Jessie suffers capture and indenture on a slave ship. His job is to "dance" the slaves by playing his fife while they're forced to engage in daily movement. Actor Peter MacNicol delivers a powerful reading of this horrific tale. His Captain Cawthorn, terrifying in volume and attitude, creates in the listener the same tension that Jessie feels throughout the journey. Masterfully, MacNicol allows Shipmate Stout's obsequiousness to creep slowly upon the listener while simultaneously revealing the affection behind Shipmate Pervis's defiant gruffness. Packed with emotion, MacNicol's first-person narration in Jessie's voice is moving and believable. Judiciously employed symphonic music and the notes of a lone fife heighten the tension throughout. T.B. An AUDIOFILE Earphones... |
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Borrowed Finery |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0312425198 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
Book Review's Best of 2001
In this elegant, wrenching memoir, Paula Fox looks at her childhood with the same detached acceptance of life's arbitrary cruelties that informs such acclaimed novels as Desperate Characters. Born in 1923, she was abandoned at a Manhattan foundling home by her alcoholic father at the insistence of her panic-stricken, 19-year-old mother. Paul and Elsie Fox were in no way prepared to take on the responsibility of a child, although they couldn't leave her alone either. Fox's austere narrative unflinchingly describes the couple swooping down on their daughter, who was being raised in upstate New York by a kindly minister, for visits that were as alarming as they were intermittent. For reasons best known to themselves (Fox does not attempt to analyze their motives), they removed her from the minister's home when... |
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Borrowed Finery: A Memoir |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0805071849 |
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| Availability: |
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Book Review's Best of 2001
In this elegant, wrenching memoir, Paula Fox looks at her childhood with the same detached acceptance of life's arbitrary cruelties that informs such acclaimed novels as Desperate Characters. Born in 1923, she was abandoned at a Manhattan foundling home by her alcoholic father at the insistence of her panic-stricken, 19-year-old mother. Paul and Elsie Fox were in no way prepared to take on the responsibility of a child, although they couldn't leave her alone either. Fox's austere narrative unflinchingly describes the couple swooping down on their daughter, who was being raised in upstate New York by a kindly minister, for visits that were as alarming as they were intermittent. For reasons best known to themselves (Fox does not attempt to analyze their motives), they removed her from the minister's home when... |
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The Widow's Children |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0393319636 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
Book Review
First published in 1976, The Widow's Children, with its unpalatable family wistfully gnashing at one another, has long defied critical description. Now that it's been rereleased, with a fine new introduction by Andrea Barrett, it's time again for readers to approach this spare--yet unsparing--novel. Approach with something like terror, or at least a tremulous respect, for Paula Fox's tale of one family's massive, various history awes with its marvelous compression. We learn these people inside and out in just one evening. Divided into seven chapters ("Drinks," "Corridor," "Restaurant," "The Messenger," "Two Brothers," "Clara," "The Funeral"), the book tells of the Maldonadas, Spanish-Cuban immigrants to America who now find themselves middle-aged and living in the past, galvanized only by sister Laura's emotional excesses.... |
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Slave Dancer |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Mass Market Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0440961327 |
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| Availability: |
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From AudioFile
In a tale at once fascinating and horrible, young Jessie suffers capture and indenture on a slave ship. His job is to "dance" the slaves by playing his fife while they're forced to engage in daily movement. Actor Peter MacNicol delivers a powerful reading of this horrific tale. His Captain Cawthorn, terrifying in volume and attitude, creates in the listener the same tension that Jessie feels throughout the journey. Masterfully, MacNicol allows Shipmate Stout's obsequiousness to creep slowly upon the listener while simultaneously revealing the affection behind Shipmate Pervis's defiant gruffness. Packed with emotion, MacNicol's first-person narration in Jessie's voice is moving and believable. Judiciously employed symphonic music and the notes of a lone fife heighten the tension throughout. T.B. An AUDIOFILE Earphones... |
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Desperate Characters |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
039331894X |
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| Availability: |
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Book Review
Meet the Bentwoods, Sophie and Otto, "both just over forty," living in Brooklyn sometime in the '60s with neither hope nor children to encourage them to work on their suffocating marriage. Such are the central subjects of Paula Fox's enthralling Desperate Characters, first published to much acclaim in 1970. The novel's action unfolds in a single weekend, and includes Otto's torturous breakup with his longtime business partner, Charlie, and a visit the Bentwoods make to their country home, which they find vandalized. Everything pivots around an occurrence so ordinary as to make us marvel at the power it wields under Fox's brilliant pressure: a cat bite. Despite Otto's protests, Sophie puts out a dish for a stray that roams the Bentwoods' neighborhood--an area which is also home to enormous poverty, and in... |
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Poor George |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0393321312 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
Jonathan Franzen
Like a sealed bottle of pure mid-Sixties. . . . feels fresher after a third of a century than most novels written yesterday.
Bernard Bergonzi, New York Review of Books
The best first novel I've read in quite a long time.
See all Editorial Reviews
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Monkey Island |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0440407702 |
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From Publishers Weekly
Fox ( The Village by the Sea ) has written a quietly terrifying, wholly compelling novel about the urban homeless, filtered through the experience of an 11-year-old boy. Clay's middle-class existence begins to shred when his art-director father loses his job and, eventually, his connection to his wife and child. He leaves without a word one day, and Clay and his pregnant mother end up in a welfare hotel, a place "where people in trouble waited for something better--or worse--to happen to them." And happen it does, for Clay's mother soon disappears as well, and Clay takes to the streets, to be befriended by two homeless men and reunited with his mother only after great tribulation. Once again Fox displays her remarkable ability to render life as seen by a sensitive child who has bumped up against harsh... |
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A Servant's Tale |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0393322858 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
Vogue
A rare and wondrous thing....[Fox] knows how to create a character.
Marina Warner, author of From the Beast to the Blonde
[A] book I absolutely loved....Marvelously observed, horrific without being violent, modesty and reticent.
See all Editorial Reviews
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The Western Coast |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0393322866 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
Washington Post Book World
Enormously touching and wholly believable.
Book Description
America and the catastrophic world of twentieth-century war, mass murder, and horror are the backdrop of this story of Annie Gianfala, a young woman who finds herself cast adrift in Hollywood with World War II looming. Defending herself with despairing stubbornness against personal catastrophe, she is able to save her life and escape.
See all Editorial Reviews
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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 |
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| Author: |
Laura Furman (Editor) |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
1400076544 |
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From Publishers Weekly
Whether culled from literary journals or glossier publications, the stories included in this year's O. Henry collection tend toward the polished, dense and emotionally complex. The best entries also add a burst of something brighter: a strong narrative voice, inventiveness or sheer exuberance. Among the standouts is Kevin Brockmeier's "A Short History of the Dead," which offers a brief but compelling take on mortality as the dead remember the final events of their lives while passing through a way station "city" before they move on to their ultimate afterlife destination. Sherman Alexie's poignant "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" follows an alcoholic, homeless Native American who finds his grandmother's tribal regalia in a Seattle pawnshop and embarks on a quixotic quest to recover his legacy. And Ron Rash's... |
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The God of Nightmares |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0393322874 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Fox's prose flows as clearly and gracefully as clear water in a stream--but there is a dark current underneath: "the implacable forces of time and loss." From a hardscrabble existence with her relentlessly cheerful mother in rural upstate New York, narrator Helen Bynum goes to New Orleans in search of her aunt, a former Ziegfeld girl and has-been actress. Aunt Lulu proves to be an irascible alcoholic, but Helen stays on in the warm-scented, langorous city, so different from the gray, frozen atmosphere of Poughkeepsie. Here Helen feels free for the first time to pursue the potentials of her own life. Enveloped in the affection of her new friends--her landlord, a poet, and his mistress; a seductive young man with silver hair who is the son of a rabbi and with whom she falls in love; another woman from the North who... |
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One-Eyed Cat |
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| Author: |
Paula Fox |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0689839707 |
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Book Description
A Single ShotNed fired the forbidden rifle just once, at a flickering shadow in the autumn moonlight. But someone -- a face, fleetingly seen staring at him from an attic window -- was watching.And when a one-eyed cat turns up at an elderly neighbor's woodshed, Ned is caught in a web of guilt, fear, and shame that he cannot escape -- until another moonlit night, come spring, brings redemption and surprising revelations.
Card catalog description
An eleven-year-old shoots a stray cat with his new air rifle, subsequently suffers from guilt, and eventually assumes responsibility for it.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
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