With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald in 2000, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Completed just before her death, The Means of Escape was Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling The Blue Flower. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States.
The Means of Escape showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand, and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power (by wealth, status, or class) and those who are not. The Means of Escape memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.
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"A marvelously quirky ciollection of short stories. Fitzgerald has a brilliant ability to make us chuckle and/or cringe at human foibles. i particularly like her ability to write unexpected endings which often brought me up short and made me sit back and think. Excellent! " — Ferris (5 out of 5 stars)
"A marvelously quirky ciollection of short stories. Fitzgerald has a brilliant ability to make us chuckle and/or cringe at human foibles. i particularly like her ability to write unexpected endings which often brought me up short and made me sit back and think. Excellent! "
" This collection reminds me of Raymond Carver. Not in the staccato style (obviously), but in the everyday themes made to seem unusual and with a somewhat open-ending. "
" It's her novels I love, but fun to be had here, too. "
" I liked the titular story, and a story about an office zombie was excellent -- Fitzgerald would have been such a great genre writer. Some of the others felt a bit pointless. Revealingly, I have forgotten which ones. "
" A marvelously quirky ciollection of short stories. Fitzgerald has a brilliant ability to make us chuckle and/or cringe at human foibles. i particularly like her ability to write unexpected endings which often brought me up short and made me sit back and think. Excellent! "
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, and biographer who embarked on her literary career at the age of fifty-eight and later earned much popular and critical acclaim, winning a Booker Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Wanda McCaddon (a.k.a. Nadia May or Donada Peters) has narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, has earned numerous Earphones Awards, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.
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