{"product_id":"9781925410136","title":"The Beauties and Furies","description":"\u003cp\u003e It is 1934, and Elvira Western has left London and her dull marriage to Paul, a doctor, for Paris and her waiting lover, Oliver, a student radical. But drab hotels and interminable discussions of politics are not her idea of romance, and soon Elvira is wishing she could leave the city of ‘many beauties—and furies’, and return home... \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Christina Stead’s second novel dramatises a love triangle against a backdrop of political upheaval. Its publication in 1936 prompted a writer for the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e to call Stead the ‘most extraordinary woman novelist’ since Virginia Woolf.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eChristina Stead\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, \u003ci\u003eThe Salzburg Tales\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSeven Poor Men of Sydney\u003c\/i\u003e, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, T\u003ci\u003ehe Man Who Loved Children\u003c\/i\u003e, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e‘Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction.’ Angela Carter, \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e‘It’s not easy to explain how much pleasure there was in reading Christina Stead’s second novel \u003ci\u003eThe Beauties and Furies\u003c\/i\u003e…It is such a dynamic novel, rich with wonderfully complex characters and a compelling storyline…\u003ci\u003eThe Beauties and Furies\u003c\/i\u003e is a brilliant novel.’ \u003ci\u003eANZ Lit Lovers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Stead paints an enticing, kinetic picture of Parisian café life and rented lodgings, friendly prostitutes and dissipated journalists, a sort of update of \u003ci\u003eA Moveable Feast\u003c\/i\u003e spiced with the rising threat of fascism. She also shows the influence, as the helpful introduction notes, of Joyce’s \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e, with a resourceful lexicon of wordplay, stream of consciousness and bravura passages that stand out from her conventional prose the way Marpurgo’s evil overshadows the small sins of adultery. A welcome reissue of an intriguing, atmospherically rich work.’ \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review   \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Text Publishing Company","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47141111005424,"sku":"9781925410136","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781925410136_p0.jpg?v=1763634814","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781925410136","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}