"Maureen Howard's new novel is the last in a quartet of books (including A Lover's Almanac, 1998; Big as Life, 2001; and The Silver Screen, 2004). Each novel is complete on its own, but characters and themes are woven across the cycle as a tapestry of the four seasons." "The Rags of Time tells of a writer with an ailing heart who lives across from Central Park in New York. In reviewing her own history and the lives she imagined in her fiction, she interlaces private rambles and public facts; the tough love of the two men in her life, her husband and her brother; and three mythmaking figures from history: Columbus and Walter Raleigh in their failed search for El Dorado, and Frederick Law Olmsted's triumph in creating the Park, "the great artwork of the Republic." A fearless impresario, she brings back to life some of her fictional characters, each with his or her own Chaucerian tale: an improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, a woman historian documenting the loss of Seneca, the Negro village removed to build Central Park." "A moving meditation on memory and imagination, on the lifeline of forgiveness and redemption, The Rags of Time, in its ambitious interplay of history, politics, art, and life, is a book that explores the very necessity of telling stories. Howard, one of America's most esteemed authors, here brings to magnificent conclusion her important quartet of novels, which aim at nothing less than a deep and broad take on American life, tempering the sorrows and consolations of the private moment with the probing of memory while questioning the public record, bringing history into the very story of our lives." --Book Jacket.
Library : General
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9780670021321