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Ballantine Reader's Circle Reader
Fiction excerpts from eighteen acclaimed authors whose works appeared as Ballantine Reader's Circle titles in 1999; with a personal introduction to each author from their editor on what delights them about their authors' fiction.
The all-true travels and adventures of Lidie Newton / Jane Smiley;
The mirror / Lynn Freed;
Children of God / Mary Doria Russell;
Saints and villains / Denise Giardina;
A patchwork planet / Anne Tyler;
The umbrella country / Bino A. Realuyo;
A widow for one year / John Irving;
The hunger moon / Suzanne Matson;
In dark water / Mermer Blakeslee;
Black glass : short fictions / Karen Joy Fowler;
What we keep / Elizabeth Berg;
Gone for good / Mark Childress;
The edge of heaven / Marita Golden;
Hanna's daughters / Marianne Fredriksson;
By the light of my father's smile / Alice Walker;
Final vinyl days : stories / Jill McCorkle;
Mistler's exit / Louis Begley;
Cruel as the grave / Sharon Kay Penman.
The all-true travels and adventures of Lidie Newton / Jane Smiley;
The mirror / Lynn Freed;
Children of God / Mary Doria Russell;
Saints and villains / Denise Giardina;
A patchwork planet / Anne Tyler;
The umbrella country / Bino A. Realuyo;
A widow for one year / John Irving;
The hunger moon / Suzanne Matson;
In dark water / Mermer Blakeslee;
Black glass : short fictions / Karen Joy Fowler;
What we keep / Elizabeth Berg;
Gone for good / Mark Childress;
The edge of heaven / Marita Golden;
Hanna's daughters / Marianne Fredriksson;
By the light of my father's smile / Alice Walker;
Final vinyl days : stories / Jill McCorkle;
Mistler's exit / Louis Begley;
Cruel as the grave / Sharon Kay Penman.
183 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
67 people want to read
About the author
Jane Smiley
130 books2,688 followersJane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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January 8, 2022
The greatest novels ever published, LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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