E.L. Doctorow

The hero of this dazzling novel by American master E. L. Doctorow is Joe, a young man on the run in the depths of the Great Depression. A late-summer night finds him alone and shivering beside a railroad track in the Adirondack mountains when a private railcar passes. Brightly lit windows reveal well-dressed men at a table and, in another compartment, a beautiful girl holding up a white dress before her naked form. Joe will follow the track to the mysterious estate at Loon Lake, where he finds the girl along with a tycoon, an aviatrix, a drunken poet, and a covey of gangsters. Here Joe’s fate will play out in this powerful story of ambition, aggression, and identity. Loon Lake is another stunning achievement of this acclaimed author. “Powerful . . . [a] complex and haunting meditation on modern American history.” –The New York Times “A genuine thriller . . . a marvelous exploration of the complexities and contradictions of the American dream . . . Not under any circumstances would we reveal the truly shattering climax.” –The Dallas Morning News “A dazzling performance . . . [Loon Lake] anatomizes America with insight, passion, and inventiveness.” –The Washington Post Book World “Hypnotic . . . tantalizes long after it has ended.” –Time “Compelling . . . brilliantly done.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A masterpiece.” –Chicago Sun-Times

A Novel

Loon Lake

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

Ragtime

راكتايم

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.

The Book of Daniel

To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.

Billy Bathgate

Winner of the National Book Award • “Marvelous . . . You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.”—The New York Times Hailed by critics from coast to coast and by readers of all ages, this resonant novel is one of E.L. Doctorow’s greatest works of fiction. It is 1939, and even as the rumbles of progress are being felt worldwide, New York City clings to remnants of the past, with horse-drawn wagons, street peddlers, and hurdy-gurdy men still toiling in its streets. For nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler, life is stoopball and radio serials, idolizing Joe DiMaggio, and enduring the conflicts between his realist mother and his dreamer of a father. The forthcoming Word’s Fair beckons, an amazing vision of American automation, inventiveness, and prosperity—and Edgar Altschuler responds. A marvelous work from a master storyteller, World’s Fair is a book about a boy who must surrender his innocence to come of age, and a generation that must survive great hardship to reach its future. Praise for World’s Fair “Something close to magic.”—Los Angeles Times “World’s Fair is better than a time capsule; it’s an actual slice of a long-ago world, and we emerge from it as dazed as those visitors standing on the corner of the future.”—Anne Tyler “Doctorow has managed to regain the awed perspective of a child in this novel of rare warmth and intimacy. . . . Stony indeed in the heart that cannot be moved by this book.”—People “Fascinating . . . exquisitely rendered details of a lost way of life.”—Newsweek “Wonderful reading.”—USA Today

World's Fair

A superb collection of fifteen stories—including “Wakefield,” the inspiration for the film starring Bryan Cranston—by the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope, or an actual glimpse of greatness. In “A House on the Plains,” a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. In “Walter John Harmon,” a man starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction. “Jolene: A Life” follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. “Heist,” the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the bestseller City of God. “The Water Works,” about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow’s revisions. These fifteen stories, written from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, and selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015, are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. Praise for Doctorow: Collected Stories “Here, without the framework of historical context that defines his best-known novels, we discover a Doctorow equally adept at plumbing the contemporary American psyche and are reminded of literature’s loss following his death.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “These tales—sketches, really, wide-ranging in time, place and circumstances—are penned by a modern master. . . . What makes Doctorow’s historical novels brilliant is their engaging prose, smart writerly style, unconventional narratives and inventive and entertaining plots. Same for these dog-eared, pre-owned stories.”—USA Today Praise for E. L. Doctorow “He has rewarded us, these forty-five years, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call ‘aspirational verve’—he sees us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also sees past that—to what we might, at our best, become.”—George Saunders “Doctorow did not so much write fiction about history as he seemed to occupy history itself. He owned it. He made it his own.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates “On every level, [Doctorow’s] work is powerful. . . . His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced, and complemented by a gigantic vision.”—Jennifer Egan “[He wrote] with such stunning audacity that I can still remember my parents’ awed dinner-table conversation, that summer, about a novel they were reading, called Ragtime, that went up to the overgrown wall enclosing the garden of fiction and opened the doorway to history.”—Michael Chabon “Doctorow’s prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.”—Don DeLillo “A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.”—Joyce Carol Oates

Doctorow: Collected Stories

New York, 1871. Kriegsgewinnler und Neureiche geben nach dem siegreichen Bürgerkrieg im Leben der Stadt den Ton an. Industrie und Banken florieren, und die Stadt ist dabei, zu einer führenden Metropole in der Welt zu werden. In dieser brodelnden Atmosphäre des Aufbruchs schlägt sich Martin Pemberton mühsam als freier Journalist durch. Bis er eines Tages in einem Pferdeomnibus flüchtig eine Gruppe alter Männer sieht – unter ihnen auch seinen vor kurzem verstorbenen Vater. Ehe Martin auf der Suche nach dem mysteriösen Omnibus und seinen Insassen untertaucht und spurlos verschwindet, erzählt er noch McIlvaine, seinem Redakteur beim Telegram, von der gespenstischen Entdeckung. Auch McIlvaine läßt das Geheimnis keine Ruhe. Auf seiner rastlosen Suche nach den beiden Pembertons gerät er immer tiefer in die düstere Geschichte der Familie. Und schließlich entdeckt er bei seinen Nachforschungen zusammen mit einem New Yorker Polizisten ein stillgelegtes Wasserwerk, in dem der genialisch verrückte Arzt Dr. Sartorius seinen aberwitzigen Experimenten nachgeht.

Roman

Das Wasserwerk

Andrew denkt. Andrew praat. Andrew vertelt het verhaal van zijn leven, zijn liefdes en de grote tragedie die hem naar dit moment in zijn bestaan heeft geleid. Terwijl hij zijn bekentenis doet, wordt de lezer gedwongen na te denken over waarheid en geheugen, over de hersenen en de geest, over persoonlijkheid en lot, en over de ander en zichzelf. Andrews hersenen is geschreven met groot psychologisch inzicht en stilistisch vernuft, een volstrekt originele reis door de hersenen van een man die keer op keer onbedoeld ongelukken veroorzaakt. Een spannende en originele roman en een verrassend nieuw boek in het oeuvre van een auteur die heeft bewezen met iedere roman een nieuw landschap te kunnen creëren. E.L. Doctorow (New York, 1931) wordt met Saul Bellow, John Updike en Philip Roth gerekend tot de belangrijkste Amerikaanse auteurs van de twintigste eeuw. Hij won diverse prijzen, waaronder de National Book Award, driemaal de National Book Critics Circle Award en tweemaal de PEN/Faulkner Award. De American Academy of Arts and Letters onderscheidde hem met de Gold Medal for Fiction. Doctorow woont en werkt in New York.

Andrews hersenen

Cuando le habla a un interlocutor desconocido, Andrew está pensando, hablando, contándonos la historia de su vida, sus amores y las tragedias que lo han llevado a este momento y lugar concretos. A medida que va confesando y que va quitando capas a su...

El cerebro de Andrew

«Billy Bathgate es una gran novela, digna de figurar entre las obras maestras de la literatura norteamericana del siglo XX.» Javier Tomeo Billi Bathgate recibió el Premio PEN / Faulkner y el Premio Nacional de la Crítica, y fue finalista del Premio...

E. L. Doctorow has been hailed as “a writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), “a virtuosic storyteller with enormous range” (People), and “a national treasure” (George Saunders). He has achieved a distinguished standing in American letters with his profound fiction, novels of great inventive power. The three bestsellers in this eBook bundle are classic Doctorow. From the defining moments of the Civil War to the heady days of the young twentieth century, the subjects and themes herein span, in the words of Don DeLillo, “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” RAGTIME “An extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of the country . . . in a fluid musical way that is as original as it is satisfying.”—The New Yorker One lazy Sunday afternoon in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside the home of an affluent American family. Almost magically, the line between fact and fiction, between real and invented characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s brilliant fictional creations, including an immigrant Jewish peddler and a ragtime pianist from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice brings this shimmering masterpiece to a shocking climax. THE MARCH “Spellbinding . . . a ferocious re-imagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange.”—Time In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times. HOMER & LANGLEY “Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

Ragtime, The March, and Homer & Langley: Three Bestselling Novels

Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In “The Writer in the Family,” a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced into deceiving a relative through letters. In “Wili,” an early-twentieth-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. In “The Foreign Legation,” a girl and an act of political anarchy collide with devastating results. These and other stories flow into the novella “Lives of the Poets,” in which the images and themes of the earlier stories become part of the narrator’s unsparing confessions about his own mind, offering a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart.

A Novella and Six Stories

Lives of the Poets

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery—and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration—is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America’s preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time. Praise for City of God “A grander perspective on the universe . . . a novel that sets its sights on God.”—The Wall Street Journal “Dazzling . . . The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole.”—Time “Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days.”—Los Angeles Times “Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence.”—Chicago Tribune “One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years . . . Reading City of God restores one’s faith in literature.”—The Houston Chronicle

City of God

Ispirata a un famoso fatto di cronaca della New York del primo Novecento, la storia dei fratelli Homer e Langley Collyer assume nella rivisitazione di E.L. Doctorow, maestro nell'amalgamare avvenimenti reali con episodi romanzati, i contorni del mito.

Homer & Langley (Versione italiana)

Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage–a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably–and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Praise for Welcome to Hard Times “A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil.”—The Washington Post “We are caught up with these people as real human beings.”—Chicago Sun-Times “Dramatic and exciting.”—The New York Times “Terse and powerful.”—Newsweek “A taut, bloodthirsty read.”—The Times Literary Supplement “A superb piece of fiction.”—The New Republic

E.L. Doctorow

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