Best Selling Books by William Styron

The New York Times–bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice. In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that nearly drove him to suicide, leading him to seek hospitalization before the dark tide engulfed him. Darkness Visible tells the story of Styron’s recovery, laying bare the harrowing realities of clinical depression and chronicling his triumph over the disease that had claimed so many great writers before him. His final words are a call for hope to all who suffer from mental illness that it is possible to emerge from even the deepest abyss of despair and “once again behold the stars.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

The day after Peter Leverett met his old friend Mason Flagg in Sambuco, Italy, Mason was found dead. The hours leading up to his death were a nightmare for Peter--both in their violence and in their maddening unreality. The blaze of events which followed was, Peter soon realised, ignited by a conflict between two men: Mason Flagg himself and Cass Kinsolving, a tortured, self-destructive painter, a natural enemy and prey to the monstrous evil of Mason Flagg. Three events--murder, rape and suicide--explode in this relentless and passionate novel, almost overwhelming in its conception of the varieties of good and evil.

The author of Sophie’s Choice, “the foremost writer of his generation,” portrays a rebellion by two marines on a miles-long march in the Carolina heat (The Wall Street Journal). In the shadow of the Korean War, a series of misfired mortar shells kill six men in a marine camp during a training exercise, prompting the commanding officer to order a grueling punishment: a thirty-six mile march through the suffocating heat of the Carolina summer. Intended to beat discipline into the aging reservists, the march instead rankles marines Culver and Mannix, whose growing resentment of the brutal trek leads to an ultimate, powerful act of rebellion. Styron’s The Long March is a withering critique of a military system that leaves no room for dignity or personal identity. Told in part through flashbacks and dream sequences, the story is immersed in vivid language and philosophical reflection—a poignant defense of the individual in the face of attempted dehumanization. This short novel marks another triumph by the New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie''s Choice and Darkness Visible, who has been honored with both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, among other accolades. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

This portrait of a Southern family’s downfall was the literary debut of the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie’s Choice. A finalist for the National Book Award, Lie Down in Darkness centers on the Loftis family—Milton and Helen and their daughters, Peyton and Maudie. The story, told through a series of flashbacks on the day of Peyton’s funeral, is a powerful depiction of a family doomed by its failure to forget and its inability to love. Written in masterful prose that “achieves real beauty” (The Washington Post), William Styron’s debut novel offers unflinching insight into the ineradicable bonds of place and family. The story of Milton, Helen, and their children reveals much about life’s losses and disappointments. Lie Down in Darkness, poignant and compelling, is a classic of modern American literature from the author who went on to earn high critical acclaim—with a Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner and a National Book Award for Sophie’s Choice—and a place at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

This award-winning novel of love, survival, and agonizing regret in post–WWII Brooklyn “belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces” (The Washington Post Book World). Winner of the National Book Award and a modern classic, Sophie’s Choice centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor; and Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor who is Nathan’s lover. Their entanglement in one another’s lives will build to a stirring revelation of agonizing secrets that will change them forever. Poetic in its execution, and epic in its emotional sweep, Sophie’s Choice explores the good and evil of humanity through Stingo’s burgeoning worldliness, Nathan’s volatile personality, and Sophie’s tragic past. Mixing elements from Styron’s own experience with themes of the Holocaust and the history of slavery in the American South, the novel is a profound and haunting human drama, representing Styron at the pinnacle of his literary brilliance. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

“Thoughtful, candid” essays from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Sophie’s Choice (The Christian Science Monitor). This Quiet Dust is a compilation of William Styron’s nonfiction writings that confront significant moral questions with precision and vigor. He examines topics as diverse as the Holocaust, the American Dream, and the controversy that raged around his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. In each entry, Styron expertly wields his powers of insight to slice through the most complex issues. This Quiet Dust offers a window into the philosophical underpinnings of Styron’s greatest novels and is the ideal entry for readers seeking a greater understanding into the work of one of America’s most celebrated authors. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

Presents a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia.

"It''s fascinating for me to read, for the first time in over forty years, the stumbling starts toward the creation of "Lie Down in Darkness." These passages show how, in my early twenties, I may have been in possession of a luminous vision for a novel but how it was a luminosity clouded by much indecision and awkwardness. . . . "Inheritance of Night," then, is made up of fragments of a beginning, bits of fruitful inspiration mingled with conceits that were stillborn."--William Styron, from the Preface

In 1950, at the age of twenty-four, William Clark Styron, Jr., wrote to his mentor, Professor William Blackburn of Duke University. The young writer was struggling with his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, and he was nervous about whether his “strain and toil” would amount to anything. “When I mature and broaden,” Styron told Blackburn, “I expect to use the language on as exalted and elevated a level as I can sustain. I believe that a writer should accommodate language to his own peculiar personality, and mine wants to use great words, evocative words, when the situation demands them.” In February 1952, Styron was awarded the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which crowned him a literary star. In Europe, Styron met and married Rose Burgunder, and found himself immersed in a new generation of expatriate writers. His relationships with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen culminated in Styron introducing the debut issue of The Paris Review. Literary critic Alfred Kazin described him as one of the postwar “super-egotists” who helped transform American letters. His controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, while Sophie’s Choice was awarded the 1980 National Book Award, and Darkness Visible, Styron’s groundbreaking recounting of his ordeal with depression, was not only a literary triumph, but became a landmark in the field. Part and parcel of Styron’s literary ascendance were his friendships with Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, John and Jackie Kennedy, Arthur Miller, James Jones, Carlos Fuentes, Wallace Stegner, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Roth, C. Vann Woodward, and many of the other leading writers and intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. This incredible volume takes readers on an American journey from FDR to George W. Bush through the trenchant observations of one of the country’s greatest writers. Not only will readers take pleasure in William Styron’s correspondence with and commentary about the people and events that made the past century such a momentous and transformative time, they will also share the writer’s private meditations on the very art of writing. Advance praise for Selected Letters of William Styron “I first encountered Bill Styron when, at twenty, I read The Confessions of Nat Turner. Hillary and I became friends with Bill and Rose early in my presidency, but I continued to read him, fascinated by the man and his work, his triumphs and troubles, the brilliant lights and dark corners of his amazing mind. These letters, carefully and lovingly selected by Rose, offer real insight into both the great writer and the good man.”—President Bill Clinton “The Bill Styron revealed in these letters is altogether the Bill Styron who was a dear friend and esteemed colleague to me for close to fifty years. The humor, the generosity, the loyalty, the self-awareness, the commitment to literature, the openness, the candor about matters closest to him—all are on display in this superb selection of his correspondence. The directness in the artful sentences is such that I felt his beguiling presence all the while that I was enjoying one letter after another.”—Philip Roth “Bill Styron’s letters were never envisioned, far less composed, as part of the Styron oeuvre, yet that is what they turn out to be. Brilliant, passionate, eloquent, insightful, moving, dirty-minded, indignant, and hilarious, they accumulate power in the reading, becoming in themselves a work of literature.”—Peter Matthiessen

From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie’s Choice: three novellas of a young writer’s journey to adulthood. In Love Day, twenty-year-old Paul Whitehurst is a Marine lieutenant during World War II, waiting to land on Okinawa, wrestling with anxiety and memories of his boyhood in Virginia. In Shadrach, ten-year-old Paul witnesses his neighbors as they welcome a guest: a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who has walked nine hundred miles from Alabama so that he may die on the land of his childhood owner. And in A Tidewater Morning, Paul is thirteen and struggling to deal with his mother’s impending death from cancer. Together in one volume, each of these affecting semiautobiographical novellas from the author of such literary classics as the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the memoir Darkness Visible, weaves together the transformative experiences of Whitehurst’s early life with William Styron’s signature deep historical insight, underscoring how the significance of the past informs the present. As the Los Angeles Times notes, it is “one of Styron’s finest works. . . . The beauty and humanity of the Southern tradition are evoked vividly.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition.The unabridged text of Darkness Visibleby William StyronVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world''s greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Swimming by Roger DeakinBabiesby Anne EnrightCalm by Tim ParksWork by Joseph Heller

The Suicide Run collects five of William Styron’s meticulously rendered narratives based on his real-life experiences as a U.S. Marine. In “Blankenship,” Styron draws on his stint as a guard at a stateside military prison at the end of World War II. “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run”—which Styron composed as part of an intended novel that he set aside to write Sophie’s Choice—depict the surreal experience of being conscripted a second time, after World War II, to serve in the Korean War. “My Father’s House” captures the frustration of a soldier trying to become a civilian again. In “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco,” a soldier attempts to exorcise the dread of an approaching battle by daydreaming about far-off islands, visited vicariously through his childhood stamp collection. Perhaps the last volume from one of literature’s greatest voices, The Suicide Run brings to life the drama, absurdity, and heroism that forever changed the men who served in the Marine Corps.

A military hospital is the setting for this darkly humorous play by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Darkness Visible and Sophie’s Choice. In the summer of 1943, a young Marine named Wally Magruder arrives at a Navy hospital in the American South, stricken with what doctors diagnose as a severe case of syphilis. Trapped in the stifling confines of the urology ward, Magruder and his fellow patients rebel against the authoritarian Dr. Glanz, a physician who delights in the power that sickness gives him. But as they seek to reclaim their identities against dehumanization, the ward becomes a hell more real than any of them could have imagined. Inspired by Styron’s own experience, In the Clap Shack is a searing indictment of military brutalization and a brilliant defense of individualism and personal freedom from the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and other acclaimed works. This ebook features new manuscripts, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the William Styron archives at Duke University.

After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters.

Chi è responsabile del suicidio della giovane Peyton Loftis? Suo padre Milton, debole e alcolizzato, legato a lei da un amore morboso? La madre Helen, incapace di affetto, gelidamente inflessibile e chiusa nel suo sterile puritanesimo e nei suoi odi meschini? O Peyton stessa, fragile e oppressa da oscuri sensi di colpa, che si è lasciata avvolgere da una spirale di follia autodistruttiva? Divisi da un''insanabile discordia, i Loftis sono spinti sull''orlo del baratro, e oltre, dagli stravizi del padre. In lotta contro se stessi, alla ricerca dell''innocenza perduta, di un qualsiasi spiraglio di autenticità e di luce, Milton, Helen e Peyton sono al tempo stesso vittime e carnefici della medesima tragedia, la domestic tragedy dell''uomo moderno che, in una soffocante cittadina del Sud degli Stati Uniti, può assumere le proporzioni di una catastrofe esistenziale. Un letto di tenebre, uscito nel 1951, segna l''esordio dalla voce potente di uno scrittore capace di costruire straordinarie architetture narrative.

Com três milhões de exemplares vendidos, 47 semanas nas listas de best-sellers do Times e vencedor do National Book Award de 1980, A escolha de Sofia mostra, em sua patética grandeza, com perfeito domínio do tempo na narrativa e um texto denso e envolvente, o drama de uma mulher corroída pela culpa, que nenhuma felicidade consegue desviar do puro e simples aniquilamento, e para quem a única possibilidade de vida é uma ligação alucinante e destrutiva. Para além das cercas eletrificadas e das câmaras de gás, o campo de concentração de Auschwitz continuava a fazer vítimas. A escolha de Sofia com roteiro, produção e direção de Alan J. Pakula, teve versão cinematográfica de grande êxito: eleito melhor filme de 1983 pela Associação de Críticos de Nova York e Los Angeles e ganhador do Globo de Ouro da Associação de Imprensa Estrangeira de Hollywood, deu à atriz Meryl Streep o segundo Oscar de sua carreira.

Le oscure ombre di un terribile passato incombono su una coppia di amanti divorata dalla febbre di vivere e di dimenticare. Ma il marchio di Auschwitz tatuato sul braccio di Sophie non potrà mai più essere cancellato.

S''inspirant de la révolte d''un groupe d''esclaves noirs qui, sous la conduite de Nat Turner, avait, en août 1831, jeté la terreur parmi les Blancs dans une région écartée du sud-est de la Virginie, William Styron, dans Les confessions de Nat Turner, fait œuvre à la fois d''historien de sociologue, de peintre de mœurs et de psychologue, sans jamais oublier qu''il est avant tout romancier. Cela l''amène à prendre certaines libertés avec les faits, mais lui permet de brosser un tableau coloré de la vie dans les plantations du sud des Etats-Unis avant la guerre de Sécession et de nous présenter une analyse aiguë d''un dangereux illuminé, mystique sanguinaire et obsédé sexuel. Seul l''auteur du Choix de Sophie pouvait raconter cette histoire violente et perverse.

A Brooklyn, en 1947, Stingo, jeune écrivain venu du Sud, rencontre Sophie, jeune catholique polonaise rescapée des camps de la mort. A la relation de la rencontre du jeune homme avec l''amour, se superposent la narration du martyre de Sophie, l''évocation de l''univers concentrationnaire et de l''holocauste nazi. Les deux veines, autobiographique et historique, irriguent en profondeur ce roman et fusionnent en une émouvante parabole sur l''omniprésence du Mal, symbolisé par l''horreur nazie, mais aussi par l''esclavage et le racisme brutal ou larvé de la société américaine, l''intolérance à tous les degrés, la férocité de la lutte de l''homme pour la vie ou la survie la plus élémentaire.

"Gabriel Trujillo se ha convertido en la figura más imaginativa de la literatura mexicana. Una auténtica revelación."El Ángel de Reforma "Estas novelas fronterizas de Gabriel Trujillo tienen la virtud de su fluidez narrativa, de una prosa directa y dinámica basada en el diálogo o en el retrato instantáneo que carece de toda retórica coactiva con presunciones intelectualistas o trucajes especulativos."SERGIO GONZÁLEZ RODRÍGUEZ La saga fronteriza de Miguel Ángel Morgado El asesinato del procurador de justicia Roberto Palacios, ex marido de Bertha, lleva a ésta a contactar con el investigador Miguel Ángel Morgado, personaje que ya conocimos en Mexicali City Blues. Un mexicano defensor de los derechos humanos que vive en la frontera México-Estados Unidos y que no acepta las cosas como son, por lo que se ve involucrado en una serie de asesinatos cuyos orígenes parecen estar en un hecho ocurrido en 1963: la misteriosa muerte de Emilio Esquer, padre de Bertha y gobernador de Baja California, que según la versión oficial murió de un paro cardiaco en su propio automóvil. Otras fuentes señalan que se encontraba en un motel con una mujer al momento de su muerte. ¿Cómo habrán sido realmente estas muertes? ¿Quién o quiénes los mataron? ¿Por qué? ¿El Senador Emilio Esquer murió de muerte natural o fue asesinado? ¿Qué papel jugaron su esposa e hijos? Miguel Ángel Morgado es el prototipo de los habitantes fronterizos. Un hombre obsesionado por la verdad y justicia, aunque para encontrar ambas tenga que abrir los ponzoñosos archivos del pasado, deba lidiar con las altas esferas del poder y ponga su vida en peligro. La novela contrasta a la Mexicali de hace cuarenta años en la que privaba la frivolidad, el enriquecimiento rápido y el surgimiento de empresas fantasmas, con la actual de ajuste de cuentas entre narcotraficantes y ciudad de paso para la migración hacia los Estados Unidos. Además esclarece las redes de contubernio y corrupción inherentes a las altas esferas del poder económico y político tanto de México como de los Estados Unidos. Una novela negra trepidante, concisa, de diálogos ágiles de gran efectividad descriptiva, con humor y con un lenguaje cuyas frases saltan, sin pudor, con franqueza, de un lado a otro de la línea fronteriza. Novela donde los muertos tienen la última palabra, la clave de verdades largas, criminalmente ocultas.

Durante el verano de 1985 a William Styron, el clamado autor de La decisión de Sophie, le desbordaron un insomnio constante y una perturbadora sensación de malestar; las primeras señales de una profunda depresión en la que se sumiría su vida y que le dejaría al borde del suicidio. En este texto el gran novelista describe su horrible descenso hacia la desesperación y nos lleva, en un viaje sin precedentes, al reino de la locura. Tras su publicación, encabezó al instante las listas de ventas. Actualmente estas conmovedoras memorias están consideradas como un clásico. Esa visible oscuridad es un libro cuyo poder de influencia abrió los ojos al mundo sobre una enfermedad devastadora que hasta entonces se había mantenido en vergonzoso secreto. Gracias a la extraordinaria franqueza y a la brillante prosa de Styron, llegamos a comprender realmente la angustia de una mente desesperada hasta la muerte. Su relato nos conmueve, pero no nos abate: con él nos sentimos elevados por un sentido de catarsis y al fin podemos empezar a entender la oscura realidad de la depresión.