Vivid, compassionate, and often disturbing, this expansive novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.

DIV DIVDIVThe bestselling story of a king’s crusade to vanquish the Devil and to defeat the monster in each of us/divDIV /div/divDIVA visiting lecturer is lured to the remote, gothic mansion of an estranged professor and his only son, who is described as a monster. But soon, the visitor enters an enchanting new world when he begins reading the son’s hidden manuscript. Part history, part myth, the story conjures a sixteenth-century Sweden in which good and evil clash for the ultimate prize. To attain the throne, the protagonist, Gustav Vasa, accepts the Devil’s counsel, but to remain in power and rule justly, he must drive the Devil underground. This sweeping, masterful tale transports us from the wasted mining hills of Dalarna to the frozen northern country of the Lapps—and into the very heart of the struggle over what it means to be human./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives./div /div

A story of an old man and an old woman--brother and sister--living together on a farm in Vermont.

The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements.

At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story set in a small Catskill community in the 1950s: when, at forty-two, the obese, gentle, and anxious Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells -- who is pregnant with the child of a local boy -- it is much more than age that defines the gulf between them. The plot turns on tragic events -- they might be accidents or they might be acts of will -- involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself), and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt and innocence, and even murder, are ulitmately eclipsed by Henry Soame's quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague fo the author, has wirtten an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised and often misunderstood John Gardner.

DIV DIVDIVA wonderful exploration into the maturation process across the course of human life/divDIV /div/divDIVLaid to waste by drink, Agathon, a seer, is a shell of a man. He sits imprisoned with his apprentice, Peeker, for his presumed involvement in a rebellion against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos. Confined to a cell, the men produce extraordinary writings that illustrate the stories of their lives and give witness to Agathon’s deterioration and the growth of Peeker from a bashful young apprentice to a self-assured and passionate seer./divDIV /divDIVCaptivating and imaginative, The Wreckage of Agathon is a tribute to author John Gardner’s passion for ancient storytelling and those universal themes that span the course of all human civilization./divDIV /divDIV /divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives./div /div

For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers. Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding. Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country. This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.