Kirjahaku

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything. Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant--now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate. Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. In these propulsive pages, Caroline herself speaks during a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe she and Lorenzo tell each other--but how true are any of them? Not a sequel to Cynthia Zarin's Inverno but an astounding mirror image in which revelations and responsibilities collide, Estate is a tight, compressed tour de force that sweeps across time and space, from New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, bringing to mind Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante, charting the exigencies of desire--and asking how can a person disappear in a hall of stories and reflections? Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, "To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art." In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards.

A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin's five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images--the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers--and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness--shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion--its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy--her first and truest subject.

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything. Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won't he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant--now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

This exquisite prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin is a poignant exploration of the author's experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time's passage. Zarin charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments in a long-vanished New York City. By the end, whether describing a newlywed journey to Italy, a child's life-threatening illness, Mary McCarthy's file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons.

What do a whatchful fly and a weight-bearing whale have in common? A grateful saint -- a saint whose life of work and devotion to God wouldn't have been the same without the loyalty. the friendship of a lion or a blackbird, an eagle or a deer. Other saints in these stories -- two of the liveliest are women -- deal cleverly with animals who act up: snakes in one instance, greedy geese in another. But in each of these stories, the commonality of all living things is luminously celebrated. The ten saints, whose biographies are given in the last pages, are named on the back of this jacket.

From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader. The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.