Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White In 1973, Australian writer Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's masterpiece, The Eye of the Storm, the basis for the film starring Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davies, and Geoffrey Rush. In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children—Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat—wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look into the eye of the storm. "An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . The Eye of the Storm [is] an intensely dramatic masterpiece" (The Australian).
Published to mark the first anniversary of Patrick White's death this book contains a collection of tributes to White by thirty-eight well-known Australians including Glen Tomasetti, Elizabeth Jolley, Jack Mundey and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Contains previously unpublished photographs of White by William Yang. Two hundred copies of a limited edition are also available.
In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.
Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Patrick White's magnificent debut novel - first published 1939, long out of print and now a Text Classic. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life. White was twenty-seven when Happy Valley was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series is a major literary event. Happy Valley is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work. Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after the war. He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973. He died in 1990. Peter Craven is one of Australia's best-known literary critics. He was founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies. '[Patrick White] was a prophet, and from his sublime mountaintop, he sent down lightning bolts on our callow heads. Some of these bolts are vivid in Happy Valley, his first novel, published in 1939 and now reissued...The novel stands up well in the high company of its later brethren. It prefigures the greatness to come, and is a more adventurously wrought than many of our own age. White is a mesmerising narrator whose prose illuminates the most ordinary object and event in new and gripping ways.' Thomas Keneally, Guardian 'Happy Valley will be a joy for any fan. Here we see a sensibility not so much forming as finding, and owning, itself.' Weekend Australian 'This is a remarkable first novel, already discernible as the performance of a master whose apprentice work cannot be glimpsed. We are fortunate indeed that Text has reopened the front door in the house of Patrick White's fiction.' Canberra Times 'My favourite Australian novel was by a newcomer - well, a newcomer in 1939. A sardonic, grotesque, oddly moving ensemble of piece about thwarted lives in a dismal country town, Happy Valley presages the later Patrick White, but is also refreshingly original and feels as contemporary as the latest bestseller.' Jane Sullivan, Australian Book Review 'Happy Valley is a harsh and unsparing picture of a prematurely exhausting, life-denying Australia. It's a world full of violence, adultery and financial ruin, in which nothing will ever change. White's main focus, as in his great later novels, is the thwarted spiritual yearning of his characters. But this is also a superb anatomy of Australian society.' Metro (NZ)
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