Boston Adventure
$37.38
- Paperback
512 pages
- Release Date
14 September 2021
Summary
A provocative story of class struggle, privilege, and poverty that put American author Jean Stafford on the map.
Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel, she keeps company wit…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781681375373 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1681375370 |
| Author: | Jean Stafford, Rumaan Alam |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 512 |
| Release Date: | 14 September 2021 |
| Weight: | 518g |
| Dimensions: | 203mm x 128mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
“Forty years after [Stafford’s] death, her sentences still gleam like knives… . In Stafford, there is the kingdom of childhood in all its taboos—its furtiveness and griminess… . Here is the fury of children… . Here is the full range of their dark knowledge.” —Parul Seghal, The New York Times
“Boston Adventure, Stafford’s debut, is like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, a raw depiction of female isolation.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Stafford is not interested in flattering our sensibilities… . She has a remarkable ability to balance lacerating irony with a very plangent pathos.” —Garth Greenwell
“Boston Adventure stands as a textbook example of formal dexterity and invention… . Sentence for sentence, Boston Adventure is as beautifully composed as any American novel I have ever read.” —Scott Bradfield, Los Angeles Times
“Stafford … studiously recreates a certain idea of literary Boston, replete with the flavour of Henry James and William Dean Howells.” —Dennis Zhou, The Times Literary Supplement
About The Author
Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was a novelist and short-story writer. She published the novels Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, and The Catherine Wheel; more than forty short stories; and A Mother in History, a journalistic portrait of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970.
Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
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