John Gardner

Grendel

A guide to creative writing examines diverse facets of writing technique, and contains analyses of works by writers from Homer to Mark Twain

Notes on Craft for Young Writers

The Art of Fiction

An indispensable reference for anyone who hopes to become a novelist, written with intelligence and humor by a twenty-five-year veteran of the field, includies everything from tips on writer's workshop to information about agents. Reprint.

On Becoming a Novelist

A genuine classic of literary criticism, On Moral Fiction argues that ”true art is by its nature moral.”

On Moral Fiction

Andreas Vollstädt

Hoping to pull his life back together, a distraught philosophy professor rents an old Pennsylvania farm house and is haunted by ghosts reiterating an old murder

A Novel

Mickelsson's Ghosts

Living in her older brother's Vermont farmhouse, penniless widow Sally Abbot finds their clashing values escalating to the point that her brother banishes her to her room with a mainstream novel she has been reading, a book that becomes reflective of their turbulent family history. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reprint.

October Light

The Sunlight Dialogues

A middle-aged man who has lost his will to live meets a young girl who changes his life

A Pastoral Novel

Nickel Mountain

James Bond must stop Xenia, a former KGB agent who now works for Janus, before the Russian gang can employ the new GoldenEye technology to destroy the Western economy.

GoldenEye

A modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth depicting the love of Jason, the hero who claimed the kingdom of Iolcus, and the princess of Caechis, Medeia

Jason and Medeia

Freddy's Book

For special services

The story of Gilgamesh, an ancient epic poem written on clay tablets in a cuneiform alphabet, is as fascinating and moving as it is crucial to our ability to fathom the time and the place in which it was written. Gardner's version restores the poetry of the text and the lyricism that is lost in the earlier, almost scientific renderings. The principal theme of the poem is a familiar one: man's persistent and hopeless quest for immortality. It tells of the heroic exploits of an ancient ruler of the walled city of Uruk named Gilgamesh. Included in its story is an account of the Flood that predates the Biblical version by centuries. Gilgamesh and his companion, a wild man of the woods named Enkidu, fight monsters and demonic powers in search of honor and lasting fame. When Enkidu is put to death by the vengeful goddess Ishtar, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to find an answer to his grief and confront the question of mortality.

Gilgamesh

John Gardner's Collection on Writing

On Writers and Writing

Roman

Jeder Mensch lebt seinen Traum

Raymond Benson

Agent 007 seeks the megalomaniac who has engineered the overrun of the world's nuclear plants.

James Bond: License Renewed

John Gardner's most poignant novel of improbable love. At the heart of John Gardner's "Nickel Mountain" is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells--who is pregnant with the child of a local boy--it is much more than years which define the gulf between them. But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events--they might be accidents or they might be acts of will--involving a cast of rural eccentrics tha includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames' quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.

John Gardner

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