It is the desire really to make myself a first person. For many years I was a third person – as children are, 'they', 'she', and as probably oppressed minorities become, 'they'. - Janet Frame, radio interview about writing her autobiography (1983) For the first time ever, this collection brings together Janet Frame's published short non-fiction in one collected volume, as well as material never seen before. Letters spanning 50 years of Frame's life are published alongside essays, reviews, speeches and extracts from interviews. This startling collection provides an unprecedented range of factual writings about herself, her life and her work. It reveals many aspects Janet Frame's character that will challenge some long-standing myths and preconceptions about New Zealand's most famous author.
The most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, this exceptional collection has been chosen from the four different volumes released during her lifetime. Featuring the best of her stories, the book includes pieces that were written over four decades, including stories from her debut collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories. First published in 1951, those stories were written while Frame was confined in a mental hospital. When the collection won the Hubert Church Award, a threatened brain operation (akin to a lobotomy) was averted. The stories in this new book also include selections from You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, published in the 1980s after a hiatus from writing. The last stories she published before her death, her writings from this time reveal Frame's unflinching ability to explore the drama of madness, isolation, and identity. This new book also includes five short stories that have not been collected before, completing a volume that testifies to the brilliance of Janet Frame's life and literary talent.
I'm a short story addict, both reading and writing them, and I always keep hoping for the perfect story.' (Janet Frame to Tim Curnow, January 1984) PRIZES: SELECTED SHORT STORIES is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many of her best stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection THE LAGOON AND OTHER STORIES first published in 1952, right up to the volume YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE HUMAN HEART published in the 1980s. This new selection also includes five works that have not been collected before. Janet Frame's versatility dazzles. Her themes range from childhood to old age to death and beyond. Within the pages of one book the reader is transported from small town New Zealand to inner city London, and from realism to fantasy. This volume offers the perfect sample of the many styles of Janet Frame's unique and powerful writing. 'Quite simply, she's a stunning writer' - Dominion Post (September 2007) 'Frame is, and will remain, divine.' - Alice Sebold
Janet Frame is regarded as one of New Zealand's foremost writers. She wrote prize-winning novels and a three-volume autobiography, numerous short stories and outstanding poetry. An ideal entr e to her writing is through her first published book - The Lagoon and Other Stories - and the only collection of her poetry published during her lifetime: The Pocket Mirror. The Lagoon and Other Stories won the Hubert Church Award, saving her from an impending leucotomy and ensuring, as she recalled later in her autobiography, that she 'was treated as a person of some worth, a human being'. Reissued here together to celebrate her life and work, both stories and poems show her playful explorations of language, vivid evocations of everyday life and consummate literary talents.
Recipient of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, Janet Frame has long been admired for her startlingly original prose and formidable imagination. A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.
Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress–Armstrong Fellowship—a ‘living memorial' to the poet, Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable—it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry. Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Menton, France as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow. It is a wonderful social satire, a send–up of the cult of the dead author, and—in the best tradition of Frame—a fascinating exploration of the complexity and the beauty of language.
This brand new collection of 28 short stories spans the length of Frame's career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories have been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Between My Father and the King. The piece 'Gorse is Not People' caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953. In these stories readers will recognize familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.
Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural' JANE CAMPION, GUARDIAN 'The idea of a new novel by Janet Frame is in itself a delight' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 'She is a singular writer. No one is quite like her' ELEANOR CATTON The Daylight and the Dust is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many of her best stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection The Lagoon and Other Stories, first published in 1952, right up to the volume You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, published in the 1980s. This new selection also includes five works that have not been collected before. Her themes range from childhood to old age to death and beyond. Within the pages of one book the reader is transported from small town New Zealand to inner-city London, and from realism to fantasy. Janet Frame's versatility dazzles.
First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.
Self-styled writer Grace Cleave has writers block, and her anxiety is only augmented by her chronic aversion to leaving her home, to be ''among people, even for five or ten minutes.'' And so it is with trepidation that she accepts an invitation to spend a weekend away from London in the north of England. Once there, she feels more and more like a migratory bird, as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life away from it seem transitory. Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all. From the author of An Angel at My Table comes an exquisitely written novel of exile and return, homesickness and belonging. Written in 1963 when Janet Frame was living in London, this is of a novel she considered too personal to be published while she was alive.
Selvbiografisk roman om den new zealandske pige Janets kamp for at blive forfatter og om hendes mange år på psykiatriske hospitaler, efter at hun ved en fejldiagnose bliver erklæret skizofren
But the mijo seed had other ideas for herself. She wanted so much immediately to live a life of ease and power.' The Mijo Tree is a never-before published novella from New Zealand literary great, Janet Frame. It was written between 1956 and 1957 during Frame's time in Ibiza and has remained in the Hocken Library archive since 1970. The Mijo Tree is a darkly beautiful fable from a writer of vast imaginative power.
THE ENVOY FROM MIRROR CITY is the third book of Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, described by Michael Holroyd as 'One of the greatest autobiographies written this century.' It describes her travels overseas and entry into the saving world of writers and the 'Mirror City' that sustains them. First published in 1985, it won the prestigious Wattie Book of the Year Award.
Frame . . . is a master . . . All [stories] overflow with dazzling observation and unforgettable metaphor . . . A powerful collection.' - Kirkus 'This is a gem of a book, or rather a string of gems, each uniquely coloured, cut and crafted.' - Landfall This brand new collection of 28 short stories by Janet Frame spans the length of her career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories has been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Gorse is Not People. The title story caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953. In these stories readers will recognise familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.
First published in 1967, The Pocket Mirror had long been out of print. Janet Frame is primarily known for her prize-winning novels and autobiography; however, the insights, diversity and deft touch exhibited in these poems prove that she is also a poet of consummate skill.These poems range from playful explorations of language, to vivid evocations of everyday scenes, to deeply moving pieces. They are essential reading for anyone interested in appreciating the full extent of Janet Frame's literary talents'The Pocket Mirror is the only published collection of Janet Frame's poetry.
In Faces in the Water (first published in 1961), Janet Frame responded to her doctor's suggestion that 'as I was obviously suffering from the effects of my long stay in hospital in New Zealand, I should write my story of that time to give me a clearer view of my future'. The 'documentary' evolved into an intensely imagined fictionalised account in which Istina Mavet moves in and out of mental hospitals, facing the terrors of electric-shock treatment and the threat of a leucotomy. This riveting novel became an international classic translated into nine languages and has also been used as a medical school text. Doris Lessing was moved to write, 'what an extraordinary woman she is, overcoming such obstacles, and making fresh and good use of them in her work'. The Edge of the Alphabet is a sequel to Owls Do Cry. Within it, Thora Pattern creates her own fiction about epileptic Toby Withers as he leaves behind the judgements of home. On board a liner for London, he encounters Zoe Bryce and Irishman Pat Keenan. Both Thora (the writer) and Zoe (the lone traveller) echo aspects of Frame herself, though because of a misconstrued identification of the Toby character as her real-life brother, she refused to allow any further reprints. As a result this is the first reissue of that novel since first publication in 1962, when Patrick White was 'knocked sideways' by it and said that Frame 'strikes me as really doing something that nobody else has done'. Both novels, like her first (Owls Do Cry), draw on the experiences of her early life, but also explore the world of the mind - isolated and inarticulate - and very different ways of leaving the protection and confines of home.
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