John Williams

Augustus (eBook, ePUB)

A Novel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller

After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power struggles, bloody wars and family strife, to transform his realm and become the greatest ruler the western world had ever seen: Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor.

Building on impeccable research, John Williams brings the legendary figure of Augustus vividly to life, and invests his characters with such profound humanity that we enter completely into the heat and danger of their lives and times.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Random House
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. März 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448180967
• Artikelnr.: 37913924

Autorenporträt

John Williams was an author, editor and professor. Born in 1922 in Texas, he served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. His first novel, Nothing But the Night, was published in 1948. After receiving his PhD in 1954, Williams returned to the University of Denver where he first studied to teach literature and creative writing for thirty years. It was during this time that he wrote the novels Butcher's Crossing (1960) and Stoner (1965). His last novel, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1973. John Williams died in Arkansas in 1994.

©The University of Denver

Rezensionen

Weir's sympathetic and detailed biography reassesses the life of a woman whose role in public life...has been underrated by historians New Statesman

The finest historical novel ever written by an American. The Washington Post

[In Augustus] John Williams re-creates the Roman Empire from the death of Julius Caesar to the last days of Augustus, the machinations of the court, the Senate, and the people, from the sickly boy to the sickly man who almost dies during expeditions to what would seem to be the ruthless ruler. He uses an epistolary format, and in the end all these voices, like a collage, meld together around the main character . . . Read it in conjunction with Robert Graves s more flamboyant I, Claudius and Marguerite Yourcenar s Memoirs of Hadrian. Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation

A novel of extraordinary range, yet of extraordinary minuteness, that manages never to sacrifice one quality for the other. Financial Times

Williams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction a consistent and well-realized portrait. Thomas Lask, The New York Times

"Readers of both Stoner and Butcher s Crossing will here encounter an altogether new version of the John Williams they ve come to know: Augustus is an epistolary novel set in classical Rome. It s a rare genius who can reinvent himself in his final work and earn high praise for doing so." The Millions

"Augustus is gripping, brimming with life." Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review Daily

This novel of an aged emperor will be intensely illuminating to anyone who is ready to put modern morality aside for a moment in order to acquire a little knowledge of himself or herself The genius of this astonishing American writer is that he shows how lives that seem utterly strange can be very like our own. John Gray, New Statesman