New Releases by Jane Smiley

Traces physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff''s role in the invention of the computer, describing his innovative construction of an unpatented electronic device that eased the lives of burdened scientists by performing calculations using binary numbers.

A new introduction by Jane Smiley and a revised bibliography complement this edition of Hardy''s classic novel about the stormy marriage between idealist Clym Yeobright and the discontented Eustacia Vye, who dreams of escaping the provincial English countryside. Reprint.

Dix personnages en quête de bonheur et d''ardeur se retrouvent dans une maison on ne peut plus charmante, au moment où le président Bush décide d''envoyer ses soldats en Irak. La maison sise dans les collines de Hollywood appartient à Max, la cinquantaine, cinéaste et rêveur, récemment épris d''Elena, anti-guerre de la première heure. Autour d''eux gravitent Isabel la fille de Max, Simon le fils d''Elena, Charlie le copain d''enfance, Stoney l''agent de Max, Zoé l''ex-femme et Paul son nouveau boyfriend. Enfin deux femmes plus mûres, Delphine la mère de Zoé et Cassie sa meilleure amie à la langue bien pendue. Intrigues sentimentales, scènes d''amour et de sexe, discussions sur la politique du Président, souvenirs et projets cinématographiques : dix jours durant la maison devient le théâtre d''une comédie de mœurs haute en couleur. Inspiré de la structure du Decameron et de l''esprit du Kama Sutra, le dernier roman de Jane Smiley est un régal pour l''esprit. La romancière américaine y met K.-O. les fanfaronnades de l''Oncle Sam, les idées toutes faites, et à la question " Que faire en cas de guerre ? " répond avec un bel entrain " Voyez vos amis, faites l''amour, discutez ".

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and “one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love” (The New York Times)—comes two exquisite twin novellas that chronicle the difficult choices that reshape the lives of two very different families. In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman’s infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. Good Will portrays a father who realizes how his son has been affected by his decision to lead a counterculture life and move his family to a farm. As both stories unfold, Smiley gracefully raises the questions that confront all families with the characteristic style and insight that has marked all of her work.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this novel set in Hollywood Hills after the 2003 Academy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Thousand Acres delivers “a blazing farce, a fiery satire of contemporary celebrity culture and a rich, simmering meditation on the price of war and fame and desire.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review In the aftermath of the 2003 Academy Awards, Max and Elena—he''s an Oscar-winning writer/director—open their Holywood Hills home to a group of friends and neighbors, industy insiders and hangers–on, eager to escape the outside world and dissect the latest news, gossip, and secrets of the business. Over the next ten days, old lovers collide, new relationships form, and sparks fly, all with Smiley''s signature sparkling wit and characterization. With its breathtaking passion and sexy irreverence, Ten Days in the Hills is a glowing addition to the work of one of our most beloved novelists.

This year''s volume, featuring 17 new stories selected by award-winning novelist John Casey, continues the tradition of identifying the best young writers on the cusp of their careers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes an irresistibly smart, witty, and engaging chronicle of a novelist''s lifelong obsession with horses. • "Exuberant...witty, completely delightful.... A kind of National Velvet for adults." —San Francisco Chronicle “Every horse story is a love story,” writes Jane Smiley, who has loved horses for most of her life and owned and bred them for a good part of it. To love something is to observe it with more than usual attention, and that is precisely what Smiley does in this In particular she follows a sexy filly named Waterwheel and a grey named Wowie (he “tells” a horse communicator that he wants it changed from Hornblower) as they begin careers at the racetrack. Filled with humor and suspense, and with discourses on equine intelligence, affection, and character, A Year at the Races is a winner.

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.

The author celebrates the art of fiction as she looks at one hundred very different examples of the novel, ranging from the classics to little-known gems, and discusses the evolution of the novel and the practice of novel-writing.

Lidie Harkness, vingt ans, s''ennuie à Quincy, Illinois. Thomas Newton, la trentaine, a toutes les qualités et une passion : la lutte contre l''esclavage. Contrairement à Lidie qui n''a pas d''opinion sur la question, il est un fervent partisan de l''abolition. Nous sommes en 1855. La guerre de Sécession n''a pas encore déchiré les Etats-Unis d''Amérique. Les deux jeunes gens, après s''être mariés, remontent le Mississippi et s''enfoncent dans les terres sauvages de l''ouest... Un western haletant, qui est pour Jane Smiley prétexte à poser deux questions contemporaines celle de l''engagement politique, celle du lien entre liberté et responsabilité.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "powerful and poignant" twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear (The New York Times Book Review) that takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest daughter objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity. “A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart.... The book has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.” —The Washington Post Book World

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980s: sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations with the expertise of a master carpenter. Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it’s 1982, and even in Joe’s small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends—and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it. Add to this Joe’s roller coaster affair with his mentor’s married daughter. The result is as suspenseful and entertaining as any of Jane Smiley’s fiction.

"It''s not true," says a character in Jane Smiley''s funny, passionate, and brilliant new novel of horse racing, "that anything can happen at the racetrack," but many astonishing and affecting things do -- and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery, folly, greed, and derring-do. Haunting, exquisite Rosalind Maybrick, wife of a billionaire owner, one day can''t quite decide what it is she wants, and discovers too late that her whole life is transformed . . . Twenty-year-old Tiffany Morse, stuck in her job at Wal-Mart, prays, "Please make something happen here . . . This time, I mean it," and something does . . . Farley, a good trainer in a bad slump; Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can''t seem to lose even though he knows that his personal salvation depends upon it; Roberto, an apprentice jockey who has "the hands" but is growing too big for his dream career with every passing day; Leo the gambler and his earnest son, Jesse, who understands everything about his father''s "system" except why it doesn''t work; Elizabeth, the sixty-two-year-old theorist of sex and animal communication, and her best friend, Joy, the mare manager at the ranch at the center of the universe--all are woven together by the horses that pass among them: two colts and two fillies who begin with the promise of talent and breeding, and now might or might not achieve stardom. There are the geldings -- Justa Bob, the plain brown horse who always wins by a nose, a lovable claimer who passes from owner to owner on a heart-wrenching journey down from the winner''s circle; and the beautiful Mr. T., raced in France and rescued in Texas, who is discovered to have some unusualand amazing talents. And then there is the Jack Russell terrier, Eileen, a dog with real convictions -- and the will to implement them. The strange, compelling, sparkling, and mysterious universe of horse racing that has fascinated generations of punters and robber barons, horse-lovers and wits, has never before been depicted with such verve and originality, such tenderness, such clarity, and, above all, such sheer exuberance.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley recaptures an almost forgotten part of the American story and once again demonstrates her extraordinary range and brilliance in The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton Set in the 1850s, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton speaks to us in a splendidly quirky voice—the strong, wry, no-nonsense voice of Lidie Harkness of Quincy, Illinois, a young woman of courage, good sense, and good heart. It carries us into an America so violently torn apart by the question of slavery that it makes our current political battlegrounds seem a peaceable kingdom. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Rousing . . . Action-packed . . . A gripping story about love, fortitude, and convictions that are worth fighting for.”—Los Angeles Times “Powerful . . . Smiley takes us back to Kansas in 1855, a place of rising passions and vast uncertainties. Narrated in the spirited, unsentimental voice of 20-year-old Lidie Newton, the novel is at once an ambitious examination of a turning point in history and the riveting story of one woman''s journey into uncharted regions of place and self.”—Chicago Tribune “[A] grand tale of the moral and political upheavals igniting antebellum frontier life and a heroine so wonderfully fleshed and unforgettable you will think you are listening to her story instead of reading it. Smiley may have snared a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres . . . but it is with Lydia (Lidie) Harkness Newton that she emphatically captures our hearts. . . . The key word in Smiley''s title is Adventures, and Lydia''s are crammed with breathless movement, danger, and tension; populated by terrifically entertaining characters and securely grounded in telling detail.”—The Miami Herald “Smiley brilliantly evokes mid-nineteenth century life. . . . Richly imagined and superbly written, Jane Smiley''s new novel is an extraordinary accomplishment in an already distinguished career.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution “A sprawling epic . . . A garrulous, nights-by-the-hearth narrative not unlike those classics of the period it emulates. In following a rebellious young woman of 1855 into Kansas Territory and beyond, the novel is so persuasively authentic that it reads like a forgotten document from the days of Twain and Stowe.”—The Boston Sunday Globe

The verdant pastures of a farm in Illinois have the placid charm of a landscape painting. But the horses that graze there have become the obsession of a woman who sees them as the fulfillment of every wish: to win, to be honored, to be the best. Her ambition is the galvanizing force in Jane Smiley''s first novel, a force that will drive a wedge between her and her family, and bring them all to tragedy. Written with the grace and quiet beauty of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, Barn Blind is a spellbinding story on the classic American themes of work, love, and duty, and the excesses we commit to achieve success. "Chilling . . . Jane Smiley handles with skill and understanding the mercurial molasses of adolescence, and the inchoate, cumbersome love that family members feel for one another." -- The New York Times

Selected lectures from writers'' conferences on the art and craft of finding and using artistic inspiration feature the works of Jane Smiley, Gary Snyder, Miroslav Holub, and Mary Clearman Blew.

In "Ordinary Love" Rachel contemplates the last two decades and the remarkable fact of her children''s survival. In "Good will" Bob and his life style are no bulwark against the effect his isolation begins to have on his family.

Le terme "saga" (d''origine scandinave) est tout à fait d''usage pour décrire cette magnifique épopée norvégienne du 14e siècle dont les événements sont racontés avec fougue et enthousiasme en ce vaste récit bien documenté.