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On Histories and Stories : Selected Essays (The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature)
On Histories and Stories Selected Essays - The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature Author:A. S. Byatt In a series of essays on the complicated relations between reading, writing, and remembering, gifted novelist and critic A. S. Byatt sorts the modish from the merely interesting and the truly good to arrive at a new view of British writing in our time. "The most spirited and knowledgeable discussion of fiction's basic questions that I have r... more »ead for some time. These questions—the kind that surrounded the creation of the French nouveau roman, and were reawakened a decade or so later by the magic realists of Latin America—are rarely raised in the United States, where discussions of how literature represents reality have been smothered beneath the arid fuss of politicized deconstruction … Byatt is a writer actively searching for sources of energy outside the comfort zone of British social fiction … [Readers must] be grateful to have the art of fiction reworked in such knowing hands." —John Updike, New Yorker "A. S. Byatt … is a generous writer. She is generous to the writers she sees as her literary ancestors and colleagues, and she is unusually generous to her readers, whom she invites to step behind the curtain to observe the set-building and scene-painting, the research and rehearsal that precede the enactment of her own fictions." —Michael Frank, Los Angeles Times Book Review« less