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Grendel

John Gardner
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

John Gardner

"John Gardner was famous for his generosity to young writers, and (this book) is his . . . gift to them. The Art of Fiction will fascinate anyone interested in how fiction gets put together. For the young writer, it will become a necessary handbook, a stern judge, an encouraging friend."--The New York Times Book Review.
On Becoming a Novelist

John Gardner
On Moral Fiction

John Gardner

A genuine classic of literary criticism, On Moral Fiction argues that ”true art is by its nature moral.”
Death Is Forever

John Gardner

As the Berlin Wall comes crashing down, one Cold Warrior refuses to lay down his guns and sets out to assassinate members of the British-American intelligence network, CABAL. Reprint. PW. K.
Never Send Flowers

John Gardner

The legendary 007 discovers a link between four assassinations, and Bond's investigation takes him on a wild intercontinental chase culminating in a chilling pursuit through EuroDisney. By the author of Death is Forever.
Mickelsson's Ghost

John Gardner

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

The final novel by John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts, originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero's own possible insanity.
Win,lose Or Die

John Gardner
On Writers and Writing

John Gardner
October Light

John Gardner

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. New Directions is excited to reissue the Gardner classics, beginning with October Light, a complex relationship rendered in a down-to-earth narrative.

October Light is one of John Gardner's masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister's color television set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy "blockbuster" novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people. Gardner uses the turbulent siblings as a stepping-off point from which he expands upon the lives of their extended families, and the rural community that surrounds them. He also engages larger issues of how liberals and conservatives define themselves, and considers those moments when life transcends all their arguments.
The Sunlight Dialogues

John Gardner

Madman. Prophet. Magician. Hippie. Murderer. Who is the Sunlight Man?

In The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner's vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece: "A superb literary achievement," noted The Boston Globe.
Seafire

John Gardner

James Bond and his gorgeous partner, Freddie von Gru+a5sse, investigate the disappearance of self-made billionaire Sir Maxwell Lustig and become caught up in a deadly international arms trade and an ecological disaster that threatens the entire globe. 35,000 first printing.
For Special Services

John Gardner
Gilgamesh

The story of Gilgamesh, an ancient epic poem written on clay tablets in a cuneiform alphabet, is as fascinating and moving as it is crucial to our ability to fathom the time and the place in which it was written. Gardner's version restores the poetry of the text and the lyricism that is lost in the earlier, almost scientific renderings. The principal theme of the poem is a familiar one: man's persistent and hopeless quest for immortality. It tells of the heroic exploits of an ancient ruler of the walled city of Uruk named Gilgamesh. Included in its story is an account of the Flood that predates the Biblical version by centuries. Gilgamesh and his companion, a wild man of the woods named Enkidu, fight monsters and demonic powers in search of honor and lasting fame. When Enkidu is put to death by the vengeful goddess Ishtar, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to find an answer to his grief and confront the question of mortality.
No Deals Mr Bond (Landmark Series)

John Gardner
Icebreaker (Ian Fleming's James Bond)

John Gardner
Cold Fall

John Gardner

When a British-owned aircraft is destroyed at Dulles Airpot, killing the almost four hundred passengers on board, including his old lover, the Principessa Sukie Tempesta, James Bond embarks on a personal quest to find the fanatical terrorists responsible. Reprint."
Conversations With John Gardner (Literary Conversations Series)

John Gardner

This collection, selected from more than 140 interviews Gardner granted, presents a wealth of information on the life and art of one of America's foremost novelists.
These interviews show him as a novelist, a charismatic teacher of creative writing, and a widely published scholar who has vast knowledge and who generated much literary information in his lectures and interviews.
After the publication of such popular and critical successes as Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), this philosophical writer with an enviable talent for storytelling was regarded as "a major contemporary writer." After Gardner had demonstrated that he was one of America's most prolific, versatile, and imaginative authors, he became one of its most controversial when he attacked the literary establishment in his book On Moral Fiction and in his interviews.
These candid conversations reveal a man of contrasts and contradictions, a writer who, as one of his interviewers remarks, "brought to everything he did a passion that at times bordered on madness."
Nickel Mountain

John Gardner

John Gardner's most poignant novel of improbable love.

At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells—who is pregnant with the child of a local boy—it is much more than years which define the gulf between them. But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events—they might be accidents or they might be acts of will—involving a cast of rural eccentrics tha includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames' quiet discovery of grace.

Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.
The Man from Barbarossa (Eagle Large Print)

John Gardner

Russian terrorists kidnap a man suspected of Nazi war crimes--and get the wrong man. The rebels threaten to kill their captive unless ten million dollars and the real war criminal are delivered to them within 72 hours. Only the KGB's newest secret weapon could possibly stop their plan--Comrade James Bond. HC: Putnam.