An amusing chronicle of the tribulations of the Ghost of Canterville Chase when his ancestral halls became the home of the American Minister to the Court of St. James

An amusing chronicle of the tribulations of the Ghost of Canterville Chase when his ancestral halls became the home of the American Minister to the Court of St. James

Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate. The novel presents a stunning series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather— as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one beautiful, radical passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides, to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: an Indian woman “with her hard,shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving,” to a gringo gobbling “synthetic milk,canned meat, hard liquor.”Adán’s own aristocratic family was in financial freefall at the time, and, as the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as “subversive now as when it was written: Adán’s uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism.”

… And behind the Northern Armies came another army of men. They came by the hundreds, yet each traveled alone. They came on foot, by mule, on horseback, on creaking wagons or riding in handsome chaises. They were of all shapes and sizes and descended from many nationalities. They wore dark suits, usually covered with the gray dust of travel, and dark, broad-brimmed hats to shield their white faces from the hot, unfamiliar sun. And on their back, or across their saddle, or on top of their wagon was the inevitable faded multicolored bag made of worn and ragged remnants of carpet into which they had crammed all their worldly possessions. It was from these bags that they got their name. The Carpetbaggers. … And they strode the dusty roads and streets of the exhausted Southlands, their mouths tightening greedily, their eyes everywhere, searching, calculating, appraising the values that were left behind in the holocaust of war. … Yet not all of them were bad, just as not all men are bad. Some of them even learned to love the land they came to plunder and stayed and became respected citizens.

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with “cynical adolescent.” Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he’s been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.” His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал)The October Country (Октябрьская страна)Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been a romantic figure in American literature--the beautiful Southern belle-turned-flapper, the glamorous wife of F. Scott, the tragic madwoman. Few readers would ever think of her as a writer. Yet from 1922 to 1934, she published a novel, a play, short stories, and magazine articles. This first comprehensive collection of her work is much more than a literary curiosity. Compiled by noted Fitzgerald scholar Bruccoli, it represents Zelda's attempt to find her own creative identity separate from her status as the wife of a famous novelist. Included are her haunting novel Save Me the Waltz , her "farce fantasy" play Scan dalabra, semi-autobiographical stories and articles, and letters written to her husband from the passionate days of their courtship to the bitterness and sadness of Zelda's mental breakdown. While much of her prose is overblown with almost surrealistic descriptions, making for sometimes difficult reading, there is an original mind and wit at work here. The tragedy is that her mental state (she wrote many of these pieces after her 1930 breakdown) prevented her from developing her craft as writer. Highly recommended for literature collections.

-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"