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Kerri Maher

Författare till The Paris Bookseller

8 verk 890 medlemmar 62 recensioner

Om författaren

Inkluderar namnen: Maher Kerri, Kerri Majors

Foto taget av: Her twitter profile picture.

Verk av Kerri Maher

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Andra namn
Majors, Kerri
Födelsedag
19??
Kön
female
Nationalitet
USA

Medlemmar

Recensioner

This novel centers around a group of women, linked by friendship and relationships, who range from deep involvement to the outer perimeter of the Jane Collective, an underground abortion provider in 1970s Chicago. While police surveillance increases, these women find ways to help each other and empower each other to improve their own lives. One of my favorite stories within this novel was that of Patty, a housewife who begins the book deeply suspicious of the work of the Jane Collective and ends the book supportive enough of her friends that she's arrested alongside them. I'm glad to see more novels centered around these themes and I hope to see more about this history, which I don't see represented often enough in historical fiction.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
wagner.sarah35 | 5 andra recensioner | Feb 16, 2024 |
Historical fiction written and researched very well. This novel is a fictional portrait of the life of real American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, who opened a famous English-language bookstore and library in Paris in 1919, just after World War I, and also published its first and only book: James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses, which in its serial parts had been banned in the United States. The store, which Sylvia called Shakespeare and Company, was inspired by the Parisian bookstore—eventually called La Maison des Amis des Livres—run by Adrienne Monnier, the woman who would become Sylvia’s lover. When the two stores were across the street from each other on rue de l’Odéon, all the bright lights in the French and English literary worlds converged; Adrienne coined the term for the two stores together: Odeonia. Shakespeare and Company drew all the literary ex-pats living in France during a time in which censorship and morality crusades (the Comstock Act, Prohibition, etc.) made writing life in the United States inhospitable to many artists in terms of censorship and sponsorship. The real patrons of Odeonia were a who’s who of the literary literati—Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, to name a few—and these people appear in the pages of this novel to varying degrees.

The story is written in the third person from Sylvia’s viewpoint, and Ms. Maher convincingly fills in the fictional dialogues and Sylvia’s internal struggles when she is working tirelessly to bring Ulysses to print and her interactions with Joyce himself during the finishing of the writing, the revisions, the printing, and an ugly period when Joyce got Random House to publish it in the United States, cutting Sylvia out of the monetary rewards she might have easily gotten if she had not been a woman. The story seemed to sag in a few places; otherwise, it would have been a five-star review.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
bschweiger | 20 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |
Fun fiction but in retrospect, it's kind of strange to read a fictional account of someone who lived in our time. I was surprised by and wondering if the $2million payment to Rainier was real or fiction but after googling, it appears that was real. And still she married him!
 
Flaggad
ellink | 13 andra recensioner | Jan 22, 2024 |
It's the story of Sylvia Beach, a women's rights activist, a bookseller, the woman who was the first to produce Ulysses when no male publisher cared and nearly perished in the process.
In 1919 Sylvia opened her bookshop 'Shakespeare and Company'. She did this with the support of her friend and later partner Adrienne Monnier, who already had a French bookshop where French authors and intellectuals came and went. This encouraged Sylvia to open an English-language bookshop. Not only did the French authors support her, but she soon counted American and English authors among her friends. On the one hand, she ran the bookshop as a kind of lending library and on the other, she also sold the books.
Everything was going well until James Joyce came to her, who was looking to get his book Ulysses published somehow. In America, the first chapters were already among the 'forbidden books'. There was no chance that his work would ever be published. Joyce was a very unpleasant contemporary. Many of Sylvia's friends called him the false Jesus. He took the worst possible advantage of his fellow human beings and disappeared when he had to pay his debts.
Sylvia, however, felt that she had to support him and threw herself into an adventure as a publisher, but also into debt and hopelessness until her health suffered.

I was very impressed by this story. I also didn't realise that at the beginning of the 20th century, same-sex love and cohabitation were not a problem in France.
I can warmly recommend this book.
… (mer)
1 rösta
Flaggad
Ameise1 | 20 andra recensioner | Jan 10, 2024 |

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Statistik

Verk
8
Medlemmar
890
Popularitet
#28,791
Betyg
½ 3.7
Recensioner
62
ISBN
41
Språk
7

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