Elizabeth Hardwick

Blondes definitely have more fun! Encouraged by her best friend, Sarah Anderson had set off for an adventure, armed with a new image and a new hair color: blonde! Neal Kennedy wasn't quite what she had in mind. The man was gorgeous--a perfect Prince Charming for any fledgling Cinderella. but they were worlds apart. Neal was far more experienced and sophisticated than she was. And he was younger! He'd made it clear he would welcome an affair, but could Sarah really risk her heart on a temporary, young lover?

"The letters of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell offer an unprecedented portrait of two of the biggest names in twentieth-century literature"--

"A tour of a century of American writers, from the novels of Melville, Wharton and James to the fictions of Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer. Twenty-five years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick's now classic essay "Seduction and Betrayal" helped pioneer the study of women in fiction, both as writers and as characters. American Fictions gathers for the first time Hardwick's portraits of America's greatest writers. Many of these pieces double as invaluable reminiscences about close friends, including Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Wilson. Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant style. Her essays are themselves a work of literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes stories by Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, Nadine Gordimer, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, among others.

Ibsen's female characters as well as the Brontë sisters, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle are considered in essays studying contrasts in heroism.

"Collection of Elizabeth Hardwick's essays"--

Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's new collection of essays. In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets.