Читать онлайн «They Came Like Swallows»
Автор Уильям Максвелл
ACCLAIM FOR William Maxwell
“He has a magic way with words…. Among the past half-century’s few unmistakably great novelists. ”
“Maxwell’s [fiction] honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft. ”
“No comparison does [Maxwell] justice…. [In] his fictional worlds … we often encounter an intimacy so intense it literally gives us goose bumps. ”
“[He] holds an almost legendary place in the American literary world. ”
“Maxwell is one of our finest writers … and like all great writers he deals in truth: an uncompromising vision of the way we are and why. ”
“Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye …. [He is] a wise observer of ordinary human behavior … a writer of impeccable English prose. ”
“Mr. Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters that the reader is constantly made aware of the larger redemptive patterns that subsume their individual problems. ”
“One of American literature’s best-kept secrets. ”
“Mr. Maxwell’s work is thoroughly balanced, gentle and humane His powers of description are remarkable. ”
“Rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose. ”
“No one else currently writing can capture as [Maxwell] does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated….
The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light. ”“Maxwell is … a novelist intrigued by the nuances of social form and a strongly visual writer fascinated by the way things look and feel…. His work [has grown] into an act of the imagination that [can] encompass a world of time and thought beyond the immediacy of recollection. By transfiguring the past in the crucible of art, he has held it in trust for the future. ”
“His characters are so well drawn you want to know more and more about them. His writing is simple and direct, poignant without being sentimental. ”
William Maxwell
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS
William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at
BOOKS BY William Maxwell
