Stoner
ByPublisher Description
Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStoner Reviews
“9.4/10
What a truly beautiful book. It follows a man through his seemingly ordinary life in such a extraordinary fashion. It’s deep, personal, and intimate; a truly amazing character study. This book uses such simple language to tell a simple story, yet conveys such complex themes and emotions, never wasting a word. It is both happy and sad and everything in between: an examination of a simple professor’s life and all of the sorrows he experiences, and all of the small joys in between. It is well-rounded and never boring, never did I think I would read a story of someone who leads a life thought upon as mundane with such rapture. And maybe that’s just it: his life is not mundane, yet to others (and sometimes even to himself) it may seem so. This book perfectly captures the complexities of humanity, and I love it so much.”About John Williams
John McGahern (1934-2006) was one of the most acclaimed Irish writers of his generation. His work, including six novels and four collections of short stories, often centered on the Irish predicament, both political and temperamental. Amongst Women, his best-known book, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a popular miniseries. His last book, the memoir All Will Be Well, was published shortly before his death.
Other books by John Williams
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