Christina Stead

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods upon me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. So begins Letty Fox's own story, a comic extravaganza in which she tells about the crazy circus of her early life; about her moping mother, absent father, and two impossible sisters; about work and play, sex and men, and the seemingly unending search for a lasting relationship. This vast Flemish canvas of a novel, full of strikingly realistic likenesses and unforgettable grotesques, is a major work by one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth century.

Her Luck

Letty Fox

'For money', wrote Balzac, 'people fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot'. In House of All Nations, the pot is an exclusive private European bank, and the spiders are a rich mixture of high takes gamblers, tax evaders, and shady speculators, all united by their love of money. They burn for it, hunger for it, and indeed would sell their souls for it had they souls to sell. Leading them on the chase is the cynical and mercurial director of the bank, Jules Bertillon, for whom every political or natural disaster is a potential shower of gold. Bertillon is a master of the devious maneuver, and his clients trust and even love him for it. In the end, he is the duper duped, but it is the clients who pay: for Jules, unprincipled to the last, has not been so foolish as to believe in himself.

House of All Nations

Based on his parents experiences as homesteaders, the author chronicles the interwoven lives of three primary characters surrounded by a rich assortment of friends and family members. Their hardships and tragedies are fodder for outrageous, embellished tales. This book is written for the thousands of descendants of homesteaders who have heard their ancestors tales and would like to read more. It is also for those who, having lived during most of the twentieth century, are thirsting for a book that recognizes their commonplace accomplishments. Humor and hilarity intermingle with pain and poignancy to capture and hold the reader s interest.

The Salzburg Tales

Man Who Loved Children

'If you knew what happens in the hotel every day! Not a day passes but something happens.' With these words the shrewd young proprietress of a modest Swiss hotel opens her account of the remarkable day-to-day events in her establishment. Little escapes here eye, still less her ear; for she is a good listener, and 'people come to confide in you. They tell you things they would not tell their own parents and friends, not even their lawyers and doctors. The period is the late 1940s. Many of Mme Bonnard's patrons are on the run from some real or imagined horror: from the Russians, from the dreaded Labour Government, from a husband bent on murder, from loneliness or madness ... '.--Goodreads.

A Novel

The Little Hotel

The Humourist

I'm Dying Laughing

High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment 'Thou shalt love'. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathan Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. Teresa preserves this love in the face of his indifference, contempt and ill-usage, imprisoned by her belief that 'to love is to give for ever without stint, and not to ask for the slightest thing'. It is only through another man - her ebullient and warm-hearted employer James Quick - that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love. Set in Sydney and London, For Love Alone, first published in 1945, is one of Christina Stead's finest novels.

For Love Alone

The puzzleheaded girl of the title novella, Honor Lawrence, is a young New York filing clerk whose motives her mentor, Augustus Debrett, finds impossible to understand. Her obvious poverty is so embarrassing for the New England elite of her acquaintance that they prefer to imagine scandal in its place. Refusing to accept promotion, but asking, all the same, for help, Honor becomes a spectral figure in Debrett's life, leaving puzzlement and disquiet in her wake. "The Puzzleheaded Girl" (first published in 1968) is a collection of four novellas: "The Puzzleheaded Girl," "The Dianas," "The Rightangled Creek" and "Girl from the Beach."

Four Novellas

The Puzzleheaded Girl

‘One of Australia’s greatest novelists puts together...a crew as sad, funny and perverse as any ever gathered.’ Time After the Second World War, bizarre characters from across the ruined continent have gathered at the ‘fourth-rate’ Hotel Swiss-Touring by Lake Geneva. Some are residents, while other guests have come for the season. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of the little hotel, their eccentricities and their desperation—their jealousies and vindictiveness—are all too apparent. First published in 1973, shortly before Christina Stead’s return to Australia, The Little Hotel is a sharp, witty satire of changing lives in postwar Europe. Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century. ‘This neat little volume will appeal to readers who enjoy historical fiction with a good dose of satire. Classic fiction from an award-winning Australian author.’ BookMooch ‘How to describe it? It’s like a meteorite from Krypton landed on Ozlit’s bindi-eye-riddled lawn, greenly glowing. Or perhaps a mosaic of imagined intimacies...Stead is a recording angel of the threadbare European middle class of the postwar years.’ Saturday Paper ‘In this highly confined setting, Stead creates a busy mini-Europe of petty and poignant crises, or perhaps a molehill of The Magic Mountain. This is an excellent place for the Stead novice to begin enjoying her artistry.’ STARRED REVIEW, Kirkus Reviews

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. Letty Fox: Her Luck, Christina Stead's sixth novel, was first published in New York in 1946, and banned in Australia for its salaciousness. Set in wartime Manhattan and told in Letty's own spiky and exuberant voice, the novel follows her successes and failures in the game of 'being somebody'. Letty's tireless pursuit of love and sex provides the setting for Stead's brilliant satire of marriage, desire and the conventions that surround them.

The Beauties and Furies

Cotters England

Letty Fox, with brio and relish, describes her picaresque adventures in the New York and London of the 1930s and 1940s. Surrounded by a family notable for its size, eccentricity and marital irregularities, Letty herself has many affairs but finds marriage elusive. Bizarre, satirical and imaginative, this powerful portrayal of a woman who might have been independent but chose otherwise stands as one of Christina Stead's most impressive works.

Letty Fox: Her Luck

'In the harbour city's steamy, fecund heat, the air is thick with thwarted longing, the people on the tram smell like foxes, and the girls with their glossy hair talk of hope chests and fight down the dread of being left on the shelf.' from the Introduction by Drusilla Modjeska Superbly evoking life in Sydney and London in the 1930s, For Love Alone is the story of the intelligent and determined Teresa Hawkins, who believes in passionate love and yearns to experience it. She focuses her energy on Jonathan Crow, an unlikeable and arrogant man whom she follows to London after four long years of working in a factory and living at home with her loveless family. Reunited with Crow in London, she begins to realise that perhaps he is not as worthy of her affections as originally thought.

«Non c’è frase di questo romanzo che non commuova e non sospinga verso la prossima con spontanea curiosità e gratitudine. Poi, però, finisce, ma giusto all’ultima parola e non a una di meno» (Aldo Busi). In una calda primavera del 1942 una sensuale ventiquattrenne, dopo aver inutilmente aspettato la telefonata del suo uomo del momento, lascia la sua stanza d’albergo e si butta per le vie del Village, depressa. È piena di debiti ma gira in taxi, va a letto all’alba ma lavora fino al tramonto – e affronta una mondanità sfrenata con il solo corredo di «completini lisi e infeltriti». Sotto la scorza cinica e dissoluta conserva una polpa romantica, perché non ha smesso di cercare l’Amore. Ma dentro la polpa romantica nasconde un nocciolo pragmatico, perché continua a desiderare il matrimonio e la famiglia. Com’è arrivata Letty Fox a questo punto della sua vita? La Stead ce lo racconta con una scrittura in cui la parola assume un profilo duro, potente, spietato, capace di rendere ogni vibrazione emotiva.

Dark Places of the Heart

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

The Man Who Loved Children

'Letty Fox: Her Luck is a fully achieved comic novel of a most original kind' ANGELA CARTER. One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. Letty Fox is hunting for a husband. Her picaresque adventures are brilliantly described in this imaginative portrayal of a woman who might have been independent, but chose otherwise.

New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match: Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he cannot best. A sardonic commentary on sexual relations and war as potent as when it was first published in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat holds up a mirror to the corruption and cravenness of our late-capitalist moment. Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century. ‘[Christina Stead] is really marvellous.’ Saul Bellow ‘A sprawling character study...Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.’ Kirkus reviews, starred review

Christina Stead

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