My Ántonia
(Penguin Modern Classics)
The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart
Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.
One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west
Xan Brooks
Coolie
Babette's Feast
Isak Dinesen
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady
Robert Coover
Babylon Revisited
The Mersey Sound
Adrian Henri (and others)
The Gifts of War
Margaret Drabble
Little Man, What Now?
The Great Science Fiction
Forty Stories
Donald Barthelme
Killer in the Rain
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
G K Chesterton
Exile and the Kingdom
Poems of the Great War
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
Sloan Wilson
Her Lover
Albert Cohen
David Coward
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Strong Opinions
Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska, with its wide open plains and immigrant farming communities, at the age of nine. This landscape would deeply affect her later writing. She attended university and became a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and then a magazine editor in New York. Her first major novel, O Pioneers!, appeared in 1913 and was followed by two more in her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, as well as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop. She lived with the editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years until her death in 1947.