Stoner
Description
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams' luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
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About the Author
Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.
Reviews
Robin Field fully inhabits Stoner's character, dragging every morsel of tragedy, inevitability, and, occasionally, wiliness and joy from Williams' understated writing. Field's performance helps us understand that an ordinary person's life is still grand, emotional, and worthy. Originally published in 1965 and recently reissued, Stoner is a small miracle of a novel that is enhanced by a narrator who is a perfect match. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.
-- "AudioFile""A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man."
-- "New Yorker"It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it's one of the most fascinating things that you'll ever come across.
-- "Time""A perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away."
-- "New York Times Book Review "The book is so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic.
-- "Guardian (London)"Stoner...is so quietly beautiful and moving, so precisely constructed, that you want to read it in one sitting and enjoy being in it, altered somehow, as if you have been allowed to wear an exquisitely tailored garment that you don't want to take off.
-- "Globe and Mail (Toronto)"An exquisite study...I had not known...that the kind of unsparing portrait of failed marriage shown in Stoner existed before John Cheever.
-- "Los Angeles Times ""Serious, beautiful and affecting, what makes Stoner so impressive is the contained intensity the author and character share."
-- "New Republic"It's beautifully written in simple but brilliant prose, a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy.
-- "Ruth Rendell, Edgar Award-winning author, on Stoner as her choice for book of the year""Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles...Its hero is an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies. Yet the novel is utterly riveting, and for one simple reason: because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honesty that we cannot help but love them."
-- "Steve Almond, author of (Not That You Asked)"
