Books with author N. Irving

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.----"Nothing in contemporary fiction matches it," said critic Terrence Des Pres. "Irving's blend of gravity and play is unique, audacious, almost blasphemous. . . . Friendship, marriage and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and disrupt, often fatally. Life, in Irving's fiction, is always under siege." Time magazine commented: "Irving's popularity is not hard to understand. His world is really the world according to nearly everyone."----

"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany."Like Garp, [THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE] is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice."--Time"Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world....You must read this book."--Los Angeles Times"Spellbinding...Intensely human...A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity."--Cosmopolitan

Excerpt from The High-School AgeProbably most people appreciate that a human being in his progress from birth to maturity passes through certain ages or epochs, each characterized by peculiar tendencies and activities. If one should ask a man whose business it is to study human nature for practical reasons which of these epochs is of the greatest importance, he would undoubtedly say the period of the teens. He would probably declare that during this period the individual is being molded into final form in body and mind, and that whatever impressions can be made upon him at this time will be likely to be permanent. People are beginning to take this view; for during the last few years much has been said by observers and in vestigators respecting the chief characteristics of this period. All have noted the appearance of new interests and activities, and the development of ex treme sensitiveness to various influences which have been practically unnoticed up until this time. The views of the practical man of affairs and the seien tihe student ofgmental development have been in accord with the views of the poets, who never tire of describing the freshness and enthusiasm and abounding vigor, as well as the excesses and the strains and stresses of this age.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.