New Releases by Penelope Fitzgerald

Basada en las propias vivencias de la autora como profesora de niños actores en la escuela de teatro Italia Conti de Londres, Penelope Fitzgerald narra la historia de un elenco de personajes inolvidables que se asoman a la escena del Swinging London, y coquetean con el final de una época. Es la década de 1960 y todos los teatros del West End de Londres se dirigen a Freddie Wentworth, la excéntrica propietaria de la Temple Stage School, en busca de los mejores niños actores de su escuela. De edad y origen desconocidos, Freddie es todo un enigma. Se ha convertido a sí misma en una institución gracias a la fuerza de su carácter, y ha hecho de su escuela un símbolo nacional, a pesar de que lleva años cayéndose a pedazos. No obstante, los tiempos cambian y la transformación cultural de la ciudad hace que ni siquiera la titánica Freddie se vea capaz de mantener su influencia. Penelope Fitzgerald conjuga el humor y la belleza en esta gran novela que retrata a los seres humanos cuando lo han perdido todo, salvo, quizá, la esperanza de sobrevivir. CRÍTICAS «Una joya de libro.» —Daily Mail «Absorbente. Impredecible.» —The Times «La escuela de Freddie es una historia hábilmente construida, lacónica y de un ingenio nítido y conciso.» —The Guardian «Una novela elegante, maravillosa e instantáneamente inolvidable.» —The New York Times Book Review «¿Qué se puede decir de un libro tan virtuoso como este? Es imposible que no te guste: el dialogo y la narración alcanzan unas cotas intrincadas y serpenteantes, a la vez que agotadoras y oscuras.» —Roxana Robinson. The New York Times «Fiztgerald es una escritora hábil, ágil, que muestra el don inglés de la subestimación. Sus acertadas frases se lanzan de forma casual; su humor nos llega con ligereza. La escuela de Freddie es una novela intrigante hasta el final.» —The Washington Post

This "classically plotted British mystery" by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blue Flower is "leavened by a wicked sense of rapier-like humor" ( The New York Times Book Review). In The Golden Child, Penelope FitzGerald combines a deft comedy of manners with a tense mystery set in London's most refined institution: the Museum. When the glittering treasure of ancient Garamantia—the Golden Child—is delivered, the Museum is guaranteed an exhibition as popular as King Tut. But soon a web of intrigue tightens around the Museum's personnel, especially the hapless junior officer Waring Smith. Then, while prowling the halls one night, Waring is nearly strangled. Two suspicious deaths ensue. And as a murderous conspiracy is traced all the way to the Kremlin, only the cryptic hieroglyphics of the Garamantes can bring an end to the mayhem. Along the way, everyone from art critics to the police and "a few nicely Wodehousian oddballs" fall under Fitzgerald's mercilessly satirical eye ( Kirkus).

Lo scrittore e saggista inglese Sebastian Faulks ha descritto in modo persuasivo l’esperienza donata da un libro della Fitzgerald: «Leggere un romanzo di Penelope Fitzgerald è come salire su un’automobile per una corsa un po’ speciale. Ogni cosa è al massimo della qualità – il motore, la carrozzeria, gli interni, tutto vi dà un senso di affidamento. Poi, dopo qualche chilometro, qualcuno scaglia il volante fuori dal finestrino». L’impressione può estendersi immediatamente ai suoi racconti. Ne scrisse pochi preferendo la forma romanzo, composti per occasioni e riviste e questa raccolta, pubblicata postuma, li riunisce quasi tutti. Spesso, come scrive Masolino D’Amico nell’Introduzione, sembrano contenere un intero romanzo compresso, tanta è la ricchezza di temi e personaggi.

Più morti, un suicidio, un falso clamoroso, traffici clandestini di beni museali, affari di spionaggio internazionale, sono gli eventi di un intreccio mistery con cui Penelope Fitzgerald costruisce una commedia «gialla» di ironia graffiante e gusto dell'assurdo.

Il chiacchiericcio inesauribile in cui consiste la vita vera e un talento per renderlo puro godimento narrativo, ironico, sagace, di impareggiabile umorismo. Vincitore del Booker Prize.

«Penelope Fitzgerald... è brava, ironica, preziosa, capace di far divorare i suoi libri con fame leggera anche se non succede quasi nulla se non un fluire spiritoso della vita, spesso di eccentricità molto inglese» (Natalia Aspesi, La Repubblica).

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘The Blue Flower’, turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones.

Here is a biography whose eccentric genius perfectly matches that of its subjects. Penelope Fitzgerald tells the lives of four extraordinary Englishmen–her father and his brothers–with style and wit. Here is the story of a deeply fascinating family mind, shared by four brothers and passed along to their remarkable biographer.

The Booker Prize-winning author's final short story collection "shows her at the top of her form...exquisite"— with an introduction by A.S. Byatt ( The Guardian, UK). Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the United Kingdom's most highly-regarded contemporary authors. Her last novel, 'The Blue Flower', was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim around the world. This posthumous collection of her short stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17th-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide ranging, enigmatic—and very funny. Each one is a miniature study of human behavior's endless absurdity.

As well as bringing to life the people and places of Fitzgerald's life and times, this collection is bound to be fantastically funny - as entertaining as the Kingsley Amis letters - and shot through with the intelligence and insight for which she was renowned.

A posthumous collection of literary essays explores the "afterlife" of the writing community, defined as a legacy experienced in the minds and hearts of their readers; in a volume that includes introductions to major works of literature, reviews of fellow authors, and explorations of lesser-known writers. From the late novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, a collection of essays-almost all of them unknown to her countless American admirers-on books, travel, and her own life and work. A good book, wrote John Milton, is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. In this generous posthumous collection of her literary essays and reviews, Penelope Fitzgerald celebrates the life beyond life of dozens of master-spirits--their afterlife not only in the pages of their works but in the minds of their readers, critics, and biographers. Here are Fitzgerald's brilliant introductions to the classics--Jane Austen's Emma, George Eliot's Middlemarch, the works of Mrs. Oliphant--as well as considerations of recent novels by Barbara Pym, Carol Shields, Roddy Doyle, and Amy Tan. Here too are reviews of several late-twentieth-century literary biographies, including Richard Holmes's Coleridge, A. N. Wilson's C. S. Lewis, and Martin Stannard's Evelyn Waugh-reviews that together form a memorable criticism both of life and the art of life-writing.

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world. The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975 at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades she published three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of short stories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in one volume. The Bookshop is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set in an isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens a bookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, and hostile townsfolk. The Gate of Angels is an Edwardian romance within a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and to his all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disrupted by a nurse named Daisy. The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical drama through the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romantic poet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair with a simple child-woman. These three novels all display Fitzgerald’s characteristic wit, intellectual breadth, and narrative brilliance, applied to an array of traditional forms into which she breathed new life.

This volume contains a collection of reviews and essays by Penelope Fitzgerald. Contents include early "TLS" reviews, pieces from her own short-lived arts magazine, "The World Review", and articles from the "Spectator", the "New York Review of Books" and the "London Review of Books".

Este segundo romance de Penelope Fitzgerald foi o primeiro a figurar entre os finalistas do Booker Prize. O cenário é uma pequena cidade costeira da East Anglia, onde Florence Green, enfrentando a cortês mas implacável oposição local, decide abrir uma livraria. Hardborough torna-se um campo de batalha, como acontece facilmente com as cidades pequenas. Florence tenta mudar a maneira como as coisas sempre foram feitas e, como resultado, tem de enfrentar não apenas as pessoas que se fazem de importantes, mas também forças naturais e até mesmo sobrenaturais. Esta é uma história para todos que se sentem tratados pela vida de uma forma menos justa que a merecida.

Fitzgerald writes a story about the formidable proprietress of "Freddie's, " the Temple Stage School, which provides child actors for London's West End theaters, a promising child actor and his rival, and a man with wicked plans to rescue Freddie's from insolvency.

Ce roman relate le grand amour de jeunesse de Fritz von Hardenberg, brillant étudiant en dialectique et mathématiques, plus tard connu sous le nom de Novalis, philosophe et poéte romantique, pour une fillette de douze ans...

The author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore explores the sad life that inspired these fine poems. Mew's story, a tragedy that ended in suicide, is one of poverty, loss, and longing, but also of courage and lasting achievement.

"Introduction by Julian Barnes"--Page 1 of cover.