With my 64 works of fiction I have tried passionately to give expressions for and to dive into the complexity of love relationships in both historical and present contexts, especially as in Land of Shadows in the view of pounding conflicts presented to fictive or historical persons, having thereby always respect for documentary research added to my own personal experiences. Also the Greek myths have been a guide for my writing, as in the case of Land of Shadows, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, reflecting old insights of mankind. Being now with my novels and plays represented in 41 countries, I see this as a sign of readers 'round the globe sharing my passion.
I read this masterpiece about the Greek hero Odysseus´ adventurous and very troublesome journey back from victory over Troy, being damned to this by God Poseidon, to his beloved Penelope on his home island Ithaca, many times. I love it for its wonderful language and fantastic episodes in its essence describing the barriers one in life has to transcend for proving one's loyalty in love to one's chosen one. It gives a picture of the matching together of the eternal manly and female powers of earthly existence. Also, it became the inspiration for my seven-volume work, Bridges to the World, of which Land of Shadows is the fourth independent one. Odysseus was punished for his boasting as a war-winner, making hubris, a lot of men could take warnings from this!
The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world.
This vivid new translation-the first by a woman-matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant language and an iambic pentameter to produce a translation with an enchanting "rhythm and rumble" that avoids proclaiming its own grandeur. An engrossing tale told in a compelling new…
A masterpiece showing me what potential a novel has in both picturing immense war scenarios of the Napoleon war in Russia 1805-1812 and at the same time how war and conflict have a fatal influence on the existence and love life of people
through a lot of different and deeply characterized characters of both the idle life of Russian aristocracy. In this context, they are the noblemen Pierre Kirillovitj, Andréj Bolkónskij, and the woman they both love: Natásja. Choosing very different ways – Andréj a military built on honor and Pierre a rebellious and humanistic one – Tolstoy in his portraits shows how the military values tend to exclude love and how the open, rebellious way of Pierre’s seeking for compassion among human beings gives room for deep love and is the strong one.
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
This grand novel has with Dostoevsky's goal of portraying “the completely good and beautiful human being” in the sense of a naïve compassion for other human beings no matter their character made a big impression on me and has inspired me for the protagonist of my novel-series Bridges to the World. In the novel, Prince Myshkin's empathy and love for people in his surroundings creates a moral dramatic mirror of the passions, desires, and egoism of worldly society, and brings chaos to the relations of its incarnations, the aggressive Ragózjin and the double-minded Nastaja. As in Shakespeare's Macbeth, love as compassion has bad conditions for survival in the affairs of human beings, although it gives great joy by Dostoevsky to be presented by the complexity of a good man.
Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent.
Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dostoevsky's own views, afflictions and manners. His serene selflessness is contrasted with the worldly qualities of every other character in the novel. Dostoevsky supplies a harsh indictment of…
This brilliantly written novel is a war and love story without any war and real love scenes. Capturing the so-called lost generations mentality of trying, in a somewhat hopeless alcoholic and decadent way, to cope with the hard emotional wounds and loss of values like honor, courage, stoicism, and glory in the trenches of the First World War. Jake, the American journalist, and protagonist, with his war injury-causing impotence, is unluckily not able to realize his true love for the flamboyant, emotionally destroyed Brett, who on her side can´t fulfill her love to him. In the subtle depicting of the tragedy of their love, Hemmingway movingly indirectly tells us about the great existential importance of being able to love and be loved. Lighthouse for me in telling about love.
Jake Barnes is a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the…
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
These letters of Franz Kafka to his Czech translator Milena are not formally a novel but in its essence the love novel, none of his novels were. He wrote them 1920-1923, being ill with tuberculosis as he was visiting different sanatoriums in Germany and Czechoslovakia and she was living in Vienna in an unhappy marriage. As they only saw each other shortly three times it forms a love by letters story of burning love transforming itself into misunderstandings and conflict. Their value lies in the genial Kafka’s trying and succeeding in communicating something incommunicable about how it is to be in love accounting totally honestly for his vast complexity of emotions from the utmost passion and longing to the state of fear of being rejected. A great inspiration to me for my novel in writing about Kafka.
Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience.
Milena, for her part, was passionate and intrepid, cool and intelligent in her decisions but reckless when her emotions were involved. Kafka once described her as living her life 'so intensely down to such depths'. If she did suffer through him, it was part of her great appetite…
The literary suspense novel with a story based on the 9/11 events in New York has been characterized as “world literature” and is planned for production as a Hollywood film in late 2022, based on Dalager's own script. The American-Danish lawyer, Jon, and his Israeli-born fiancée, Eve, who works on the 86th Floor of the South Tower are amongst the victims caught in the conflagration, and he tries to rescue her from the building. The natural fear and anger in the wake of 9/11 give rise to prejudice and a threat of compounding injustice. The love between Jon and Eve is central to the story, which eventually leads the reader to Jerusalem and Hebron.
Head West in 1865 with two life-long friends looking for adventure and who want to see the wilderness before it disappears. One is a wanderer; the other seeks a home he lost. The people they meet on their journey reflect the diverse events of this time period–settlers, adventure seekers, scientific…
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
