Larry's Party
Type
Book
Authors
ISBN 10
0679308776
ISBN 13
9780679308775
Category
813 Fiction
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Publication Year
1997
Publisher
Pages
339
Subject
Men -- Social conditions -- Fiction. Landscape architects -- Fiction. Maze puzzles -- Fiction.
Tags
Abstract
A comedy on the rise of a nobody. It happens to Larry Weller, a Winnipeg floral designer who goes for his honeymoon to England. The couple visit Hampton Court with its shrubs and Weller discovers his vocation, becoming a famous maze builder.
Description
Publisher Comments
The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a literary career already ablaze with achievement. As well as the many international awards it received, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award, the book also met with universal critical acclaim and topped bestseller lists around the world. Carol Shields, raved Maclean's, has crafted a small miracle of a novel. The Stone Diaries, said the New York Times Book Review, reminds us again why literature matters.
The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries a universal study of what makes women tick. Now, in Larry's Party, Carol Shields does the same for men.
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash backward and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the new millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose transforms the trivial into the momentous. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, his interactions with parents, friends and a son. And throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes -- so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self.
Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy and faultless wisdom.
The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a literary career already ablaze with achievement. As well as the many international awards it received, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award, the book also met with universal critical acclaim and topped bestseller lists around the world. Carol Shields, raved Maclean's, has crafted a small miracle of a novel. The Stone Diaries, said the New York Times Book Review, reminds us again why literature matters.
The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries a universal study of what makes women tick. Now, in Larry's Party, Carol Shields does the same for men.
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash backward and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the new millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose transforms the trivial into the momentous. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, his interactions with parents, friends and a son. And throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes -- so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self.
Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy and faultless wisdom.
Biblio Notes
Genre/Form: Fiction
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Carol Shields; Paul Whitney Collection.
OCLC Number: 971118224
Notes: "Advance uncorrected proof"--Cover.
Description: 339 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Responsibility: Carol Shields.
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Carol Shields; Paul Whitney Collection.
OCLC Number: 971118224
Notes: "Advance uncorrected proof"--Cover.
Description: 339 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Responsibility: Carol Shields.
Number of Copies
1
