| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||

› Find signed collectible books: 'Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette'
More editions of Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ahab's Wife Or, the Star-Gazer'
It has been said that one can see further only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honours that aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into early 19th-century America. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman, she suggests that New England life was broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships and whales. This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from his lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general. Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her puritanical father and to pursue a more exalted life. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck:
I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe.The ship dies, but Una returns to land to pursue the life of the mind. The novel's opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--also diminishes Melville's hero in the broader scheme of things. Naslund exposes the reader to the unsung, real-life heroes of Melville's world, including Margaret Fuller and her Boston salon, and Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. There is a chance meeting with a veiled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the woods, and throughout the novel the story brims with references to the giants of literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Although her novel runs long at nearly 700 pages, Naslund has created an imaginative, entertaining, and very impressive work. --Ted Leventhal [via]
More editions of Ahab's Wife Or, the Star-Gazer:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Disobedience of Water'
From the acclaimed author of Sherlock in Love (Godine, 1994) comes a new collection of finely perceived, beautifully crafted stories evoking all the passion and heartbreak, intelligence and unapologetic humanity of Naslund's earlier work.
The stories in The Disobedience of Water explore the boundary conditions between self and others. Social realities racial and ethnic tensions, sexual harassment and abuse provide the backdrop for struggles that ultimately take place in the heart. While Naslund's characters accept that their inner tides cannot be brought into obedience, sometimes, in the act of recognizing the force of their own hopes, needs, and fears, they learn to navigate those waters.
These are, in the broadest sense of the word, love stories: of finding, discovering, and admitting love and forgiveness, whether a daughter s love for her father in the face of perceived betrayal, or a wife s love of her friend and her husband in the half-light of infidelity. In the long title story, which takes the form of a painfully revealing letter to an almost-lover, the narrator winds through swirling eddies of memory and language to deliver her present and past lives, and the loves that have informed them. Written with a masterful sureness of hand and heart, The Disobedience of Water will set a new milestone in Sena Jeter Naslund's career as one of our most rewarding new writers of fiction. [via]
More editions of The Disobedience of Water:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Disobedience of Water: Stories and Novellas'
More editions of The Disobedience of Water: Stories and Novellas:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Four Spirits: A Novel'

› Find signed collectible books: 'High Horse: Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University'
More editions of High Horse: Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ice Skating at the North Pole'
More editions of Ice Skating at the North Pole:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Sherlock in Love: A Novel'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Walfängerin.'
More editions of Die Walfängerin.:
Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site:
Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.
