My Antonia

My Antonia

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. It is the final book of her "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.
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O Pioneers!

O Pioneers!

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

In the early 1900s, Alexandra Bergson, daughter of a Swedish immigrant, inherits the family farm when her father dies and she chooses to devote her life to making the farm work -- at a time when other immigrants are leaving the prairies of Nebraska. The novel also follows the romance between Alexandra and a family friend, and between Alexandra\'s brother and a married woman.
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Collected Stories

Collected Stories

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

A ruined beauty whose dignity has suffered a lifetime of loss and disenchantment. A Czech immigrant who finds a paradoxical contentment on the harsh expanse of the Nebraska prairie. A solitary young painter spying raptly and guiltily on his exquisite neighbor. These are some of the lives that Willa Cather renders, with a fine balance of compassion and detachment, in these nineteen stories. Here are the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment. BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. 
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A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

Marian Forrester is the symbolic flower of the Old American West. She draws her strength from that solid foundation, bringing delight and beauty to her elderly husband, to the small town of Sweet Water where they live, to the prairie land itself, and to the young narrator of her story, Neil Herbert. All are bewitched by her brilliance and grace, and all are ultimately betrayed. For Marian longs for "life on any terms," and in fulfilling herself, she loses all she loved and all who loved her. This, Willa Cather's most perfect novel, is not only a portrait of a troubling beauty, but also a haunting evocation of a noble age slipping irrevocably into the past.
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Obscure Destinies

Obscure Destinies

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

The jacket of the first edition of Obscure Destinies announced “Three New Stories of the West,” heralding Willa Cather’s return to what many thought of as “her” territory—the Great Plains. These three stories, “Neighbour Rosicky,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Two Friends,” reflected her return to the well of memory that had inspired the books that made her reputation. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents for the first time the three stories in their historical and biographical context, with an interpretive historical essay and detailed explanatory notes. The textual essay and apparatus establish the definitive text and trace Cather’s changes through newly discovered prepublication versions.
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One of Ours

One of Ours

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

Although it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, this stirring novel about World War I remains far less known than Cather's established classics such as My �ntonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. In the lucid, unadorned prose that was her hallmark, Cather brings to life the simple Nebraska farm folk and their tranquil rural lifestyle, showing how the Great War, seemingly so far away on the Old Continent, eventually touches them all. More than half of the novel is devoted to the slow rhythms of the prairie farmland centering on the Wheeler homestead. The novel's protagonist, Claude Wheeler, a strong, healthy, red-headed farm boy, is physically a typical representative of his sturdy sodbuster family and hard-working neighbors. But mentally the boy has little in common with their narrow outlooks, and the limited horizons of his parochial community make him restless and filled with a barely suppressed discontent. Through a series of striking vignettes, Cather brilliantly reveals Claude's search for some greater purpose to his life beyond the routines of farm life. Gradually, the widening war in Europe sneaks up on the rural Nebraska region, as newspaper reports of refugees and German atrocities begin to stir the emotions of the local young men. When the United States finally enters the conflict, Claude is one of the first to enlist, seeing purpose, adventure, and commitment to some larger ideal in the call to arms. Claude's longings for radically new experiences are more than amply realized overseas in sobering encounters with suffering French women and children, the battle-scarred English "Tommies," and the tenacious German enemy. One of Ours is a memorable testament to the shattering effects of war on youth and ideals, a powerful depiction of mechanized battle, and its life-changing effects on one Nebraska farm boy and the people he left behind.
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My Mortal Enemy

My Mortal Enemy

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

First published in 1926, this book is Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and oddly prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of happiness and the sanctity of the hearth. BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.
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Coming, Aphrodite!

Coming, Aphrodite!

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

Best known for the distinctive portraits of the people and land of the American West in her prairie novels, Willa Cather is one of the greatest American writers of this century. The fourteen short stories in this richly diverse collection, along with an exemplary introduction by author Cynthia Griffin Wolff, allow for a more complex view of Cather. As a writer she was intrigued by nature's ruthlessness and mankind's limitless potential for brutality and had a passion for the beauty of art. Ranging from the simplicity of Cather's first published story, "Peter" (1892), to the extraordinary eroticism of "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920), this Twentieth-Century Classics collection is an engaging and triumphant testament to the genius of an American literary icon. 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. **About the Author Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and raised on a Nebraska ranch. She is known for her beautifully evocative short stories and novels about the American West. Cather became the managing editor for  McClure’s Magazine  in 1906 and lived for forty years in New York City with her companion Edith Lewis. In 1922 Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for  One of Ours , the story of a Western boy in World War I. In 1933 she was awarded the Prix Femina Americaine “for distinguished literary accomplishments.” 
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The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873[1] - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My ntonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at age 33 she moved to New York where she lived for the rest of her life. (wikipedia.org) A collection of short stories by Willa Cather includes the following stories. On the Divide Eric Hermannson's Soul The Enchanted Bluff The Bohemian Girl THE TROLL GARDEN Flavia and Her Artists The Sculptor's Funeral "A Death in the Desert" The Garden Lodge The Marriage of Phaedra A Wagner Matinee Paul's Case
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Complete Works of Willa Cather

Complete Works of Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Literature & Fiction

An American author of the Interwar period, Willa Cather achieved recognition for her nostalgic novels of frontier life on the Great Plains. Her novels are noted for their atmospheric and vivid portrayals of the landscape and the lives of settlers, immortalising Nebraska’s pioneer life. In 1923 Cather achieved international acclaim and financial security when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘One of Ours’ (1922), a novel set during World War I. This comprehensive eBook presents Cather’s complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material.  Description * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Cather’s life and works * Concise introductions to the novels and other texts * All 12 novels, with individual contents tables * Features rare short stories appearing for the first time in digital publishing * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the short stories * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * Includes Cather’s rare poetry collection – available in no other collection * Rare non-fiction works * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and genres CONTENTS: The Prairie Trilogy The Novels Alexander’s Bridge O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark My Ántonia One of Ours A Lost Lady The Professor’s House My Mortal Enemy Death Comes for the Archbishop Shadows on the Rock Lucy Gayheart Sapphira and the Slave Girl The Short Story Collections The Troll Garden Youth and the Bright Medusa Obscure Destinies The Old Beauty and Others A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays Uncollected Short Stories The Short Stories List of Short Stories in Chronological Order List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order The Poetry April Twilights and Other Poems The Non-Fiction The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science Not Under Forty A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays Miscellaneous Pieces
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