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Undermajordomo Minor
''Undermajordomo Minor'' is a 2015 novel by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt. It is his third novel and was published by House of Anansi Press on September 5, 2015. The novel is a gothic fable set in an unspecified time and location that has been compared to 19th-century Central and Eastern Europe. It was longlisted for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Sophie Voillot's French translation was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General's Award for English to French translation. Influences Patrick deWitt credits numerous writers and artists in the novel's acknowledgements as his influences while writing the writing the book, including Thomas Bernhard, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Italo Calvino, Dennis Cooper, Robert Coover, Roald Dahl, J. P. Donleavy, C.F., Knut Hamsun, Sammy Harkham, Werner Herzog, Bohumil Hrabal, Shirley Jackson, Pär Lagerkvist, Harry Mathews, Steven Millhauser, Jean Rhys, Robert Walser, and Eudora Welty. Publication ''Undermajordomo Minor'' was publis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patrick DeWitt
Patrick deWitt (born 1975) is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. Born on Vancouver Island, deWitt lives in Portland, Oregon and has acquired American citizenship. As of 2023, he has written five novels: ''Ablutions'' (2009), ''The Sisters Brothers'' (2011), '' Undermajordomo Minor'' (2015), '' French Exit'' (2018) and '' The Librarianist'' (2023). Biography DeWitt was born on Vancouver Island at Sidney, British Columbia. The second of three brothers, he spent his childhood moving back and forth across the west coast of North America. He credits his father, a carpenter, with giving him his "lifelong interest in literature." DeWitt dropped out of high school to become a writer. He moved to Los Angeles, working at a bar. He left Los Angeles to move back in with his parents in the Seattle area, on Bainbridge Island. When he sold his first book ''Ablutions'' (2009), deWitt quit his job as a construction worker to become a writer, and moved to Portland, Oregon. Although born a Can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun (4 August 1859 – 19 February 1952) was a Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays. Hamsun is considered to be "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years" (''ca.'' 1890–1990). He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and influenced authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, John Fante and Ernest Hemingway. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Granta Books
''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, ''The Observer'' stated: "In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, ''Granta'' has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world." Granta has published twenty-seven laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Literature published by Granta regularly win prizes such as the Forward Prize, T. S. Eliot Prize, Pushcart Prize and more. History ''Granta'' was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as ''The Granta'', edited by R. C. Lehmann (who later became a major contributor to ''Punch''). It was started as a periodical featuring student politics, badinage and literary efforts. The title was taken from the medieval nam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Granta
''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, ''The Observer'' stated: "In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, ''Granta'' has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world." Granta has published twenty-seven laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Literature published by Granta regularly win prizes such as the Forward Prize, T. S. Eliot Prize, Pushcart Prize and more. History ''Granta'' was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as ''The Granta'', edited by R. C. Lehmann (who later became a major contributor to ''Punch''). It was started as a periodical featuring student politics, badinage and literary efforts. The title was taken from the medieval name ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Walrus
''The Walrus'' is an independent, non-profit Canadian media organization. It is multi-platform and produces an 8-issue-per-year magazine and online editorial content that includes current affairs, fiction, poetry, and podcasts, a national speaker series called The Walrus Talks, and branded content for clients through The Walrus Lab. History Creation In 2002, David Berlin, a former editor and owner of the ''Literary Review of Canada'', began promoting his vision of a world-class Canadian magazine. This led him to meet with then-''Harper's'' editor Lewis H. Lapham to discuss creating a "''Harper's'' North," which would combine the American magazine with 40 pages of Canadian content. As Berlin searched for funding to create that content, a mutual friend put him in touch with Ken Alexander, a former high school English and history teacher and then senior producer of CBC Newsworld's ''CounterSpin''. Like Berlin, Alexander was hoping to found an intelligent Canadian magazin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel ''The Optimist's Daughter'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum. Biography Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty (1879–1931) and Mary Chestina (Andrews) Welty (1883–1966). She grew up with younger brothers Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Welty soon developed a love of reading reinforced by her mother, who believed that "any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Walser (writer)
Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956) was a German-speaking Swiss writer. Walser is understood to be the missing link between Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka. As writes Susan Sontag, "at the time f Walser's writing it was more likely to be Kafka ho was understoodthrough the prism of Walser." For example, Robert Musil once referred to Kafka's work as "a peculiar case of the Walser type." Walser was admired early on by Kafka and writers such as Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin, and was in fact better known during his lifetime than Kafka or Benjamin were known in theirs. Nevertheless, Walser was never able to support himself based on the meager income he made from his writings, and he worked as a copyist, an inventor's assistant, a butler, and in various other low-paying trades. Despite marginal early success in his literary career, the popularity of his work gradually diminished over the second and third decades of the 20th century, making it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys, ( ; born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel ''Wide Sargasso Sea'' (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's ''Jane Eyre''. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing. Early life Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, née Lockhart, a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry. ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.) She had a brother. Her mother's family had an estate, a former plantation, on the island. Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel '' Martin Dressler''. Life and career Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of '' Edwin Mullhouse'' and ''From the Realm of Morpheus'' in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote ''Portrait of a Romantic'' at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in ''The Barnum Museum'') features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life. Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, ''Edwin Mullhouse''. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews (February 14, 1930 – January 25, 2017) was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language. Life Born in New York City to an upper-middle-class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton School in Massachusetts, before enrolling at Princeton University in 1947. He left Princeton in his sophomore year for a tour in the United States Navy, during the course of which (in 1949) he eloped with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, a childhood friend. His military service completed, Mathews transferred to Harvard University in 1950; the couple's first child, a daughter, was born the following year. After Mathews graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in music, the family moved to Paris, where he continued studies in conducting Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance, such as an orchestral or choral concert. It ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pär Lagerkvist
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (23 May 1891 – 11 July 1974) was a Swedish author who received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lagerkvist wrote poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence from his early 20s to his late 70s. One of his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as Barabbas, the man who was freed instead of Jesus, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. As a moralist, he used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of a church. Biography and works Lagerkvist was born in Växjö ( Småland). He received a traditional religious education – he would later say, with little exaggeration, that he "had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns". In his teens he broke away from Christian beliefs, but, unlike many other writers and thinkers in his generation, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories. Born in San Francisco, California, Jackson attended Syracuse University in New York, where she became involved with the university's literary magazine and met her future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman. After they graduated, the couple moved to New York and began contributing to ''The New Yorker,'' with Jackson as a fiction writer and Hyman as a contributor to "Talk of the Town". The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, in 1945, after the birth of their first child, when Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College. After publishing her debut novel ''The Road Through the Wall'' (1948), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in California, Jackson gained significant public attention ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
