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).

«Un gioiello di libro» secondo il «Daily Mail»: gli affanni e gli affari quotidiani intorno a una scuola per attori bambini di Londra. Un altro pezzo dell'incantevole, indimenticabile, perfetta ironia della «Austen dei nostri tempi» che si stende su esistenze uniche e grandi perché ordinarie.

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.

La joven Chiara Ridolfi acaba de salir del colegio inglés en el que ha pasado su infancia. Al llegar a Florencia, donde viven su padre y su tía, descendientes de una antigua familia de nobles italianos ahora venida a menos, se enamora perdidamente del doctor Salvatore Rossi, un hombre recio, hecho a sí mismo y con una inmensa conciencia de clase. Pero a partir de su primer encuentro, en un concierto para violín de Brahms, el mundo parece confabularse para que sientan que todo se interpone en su camino. El carácter de ambos, insegura ella e inflexible él, ayuda a hacer de su vida algo insoportable. Hasta que alguien decide adoptar una medida sorprendente y extrema, fruto de una peculiaridad ancestral del temperamento familiar. Penelope Fitzgerald, autora de "La librería" y "El inicio de la primavera", vuelve con una novela inteligentísima y tremendamente seductora, que nos recuerda a una comedia de Shakespeare y que crea un universo real y completo, casi tangible, en el que es posible encontrar un auténtico prodigio tras cada esquina.

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald

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.

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.

With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Concise, comic, biting, and mischievous, they are vintage Fitzgerald. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power--by wealth, status, or class--and those who, deceptively, are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.

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.

The "human voices" of Penelope Fitzgerald's enchanting novel are those of an eccentric group of broadcasters at the BBC in London during the air raids of World War II. When British listeners tuned in to the Nine O'Clock News in the middle of 1940, they had no idea what human dramas -- and follies -- were unfolding behind the scenes. Targeted by enemy bombers, the BBC had turned its concert hall into a dormitory for both sexes. And, as in any dormitory, romance and intrigue prevailed. At the center of Human Voices is the tense relationship between two departmental directors and a surprising love affair with a sixteen-year-old intern named Annie, who has the perfect pitch. Like Fitzgerald's novels Offshore and The Bookshop, Human Voices grew out of her personal experience -- she worked for the BBC during the war, when the station served as a lifeline to the troops and a singular source of truth to the public. Romantic, ironic, tragic, as only Penelope Fitzgerald can be, Human Voices is an unexpected treat for her many American fans.

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of all there's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little girls. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel.

In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside-down.

Beautiful Chiara is the last of the Ridolfi, a Florentine family of long lineage and eccentric habits. She is smitten with Salvatore, a brilliant but penniless doctor, a rational man who wants nothing to do with romance. This is the story of how these two--with the best intentions, the kindest of instincts, and the most meddlesome of friends--make each other wonderfully miserable inside.

Frank Reid is a struggling printer in Moscow. On the eve of the Revolution, his wife returns to her native England, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. How does a reasonable man like Frank cope? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his bookkeeper? And should he, in his wife's absence, resist his desire for his lovely Russian housemaid? How can anyone know how to live the right life?

In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard! How can it be? A literary sensation and a bestseller in England and the United States, The Blue Flower was one of eleven books- and the only paperback- chosen as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner in Fiction.