Шерли Энн Грау – лучшие книги

Остросюжетный роман известной американской писательницы, отмеченный в своё время Пулитцеровской премией, в острой, почти публицистической форме затрагивает проблему расовых противоречий на юге США.

Любовь... Это светлое чувство порой таит тревоги и мучения. Но если чувство рождается между мужчиной и женщиной разного цвета кожи, то к мукам любви добавляются непонимание и неприязнь окружающих.

Автор книги обращается к важнейшим проблемам жизни американского общества и среди них - к негритянской, которая на Юге звучит особенно остро. В центре повествования - история трех поколений семьи новоорлеанского миллионера. Это мир наживы и алчности, где достоинство человека определяется только деньгами. События даются в оценке негра-дворецкого, который в конце покидает дом своего господина, не желая иметь ничего общего с этим миром.

Tells the stories of women facing turning points in their lives, from divorce to survival of a plane crash

On the tiny Isle aux Chiens in the central coastal curve east of the tripartite mouth of the Mississippi, live the witty, resourceful and often inscrutable descendants of Louisiana's French-Spanish pioneers. They watch, they quarrel and they love, always beneath a hard, blue sky.

An attractive middle-aged woman, sailing with her brother-in-law to rescue her husband, stranded in a summer squall.

This magnificent summation of the short stories of Shirley Ann Grau, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Keepers of the House, gathers together eighteen gems ranking with the finest of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Grau possesses a range representing a master course in the craft of this most demanding art form. Her reader's banquet offers character sketches of Chekovian poignance and insight, a hilarious love story, excursions into the gothic and hauntingly apocalyptic, the elegiac and experimental, and stories that feel like compressed novels in their lapidary polish, depth, and emotional weight. Grau belongs in the company of the great southern short story writers, and the author's own choices of her best work remind readers of the unmatched capacity of the brief fictional form to depict character epiphany and such timeless themes as redemption and rebirth, the struggle between power and love, and the persistence of the past. AUTHOR BIO: Shirley Ann Grau grew up in

Twenty-year-old Joan Mitchell has lived her entire life in the stately New Orleans house on Coliseum Street, where her mother and half sister have steadily undermined her self-regard. To Joan, her fate seems sealed and strangely inconsequential. Then a brief affair with Michael Kern, a man she knows to be a cad but is drawn to anyway, unfurls for her a surreal sequence of events -- pregnancy, an abortion, and eventually withdrawal into a numbed existence. Only a growing obsession with Michael and a yearning to fill her cavernous loneliness spur Joan to any premeditated action. An intricate psychological novel that plumbs the pain and rage born of identity and volition suppressed, The House on Coliseum Street is an arresting, somber story that transcends period and place even as it so immediately evokes New Orleans in the late 1950s.

The ruthless accumulation, the spending, and the ultimate disposition of a great New Orleans fortune furnish the motive force in Shirley Ann Grau's brilliat novel of three American generations whose lives are caught up in and shaped by the currents of southern power. As his family hovers around him, heirs apparent, the ninety-five-year-old multimillionaire, Thomas Henry Oliver holds court. While leashing his torrential energies, it has suffocated his daughter Anna, who has retreated into religious fanaticism, and turned his younger daughter Margaret into a shrewd businesswoman. Robert, the poverty-stricken Cajun boy whom Oliver raised to be the son he never had, is possessed by the money. Of everyone exposed to Oliver and his gold, only the secretive black chauffeur, Stanley - the legendary condor of the title - appears to have held himself intact