About the Author:
Born in 1932, Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic. She is perhaps best known for writing the screenplay for Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and she wrote several novels, including One by One (1965) and A State of Change (1967). As a film critic, Gilliatt wrote numerous reviews for The Observer before she began a column that ran for years in The New Yorker, in which she alternated for six month intervals with Pauline Kael as chief film reviewer. She was married to playwright John Osborne from 1963-1968, giving him his only natural child a daughter, Nolan. She died on 9 May 1993.
Review:
Her wits are witty, her moments of ghastly farce perfectly achieved... in a taunt and lucid phraseology without tricks, but with precise effects OBSERVER Penelope Gilliatt is one of our really distinctive talents, a true original -- Rebecca West The kind of fine collection whose last page is turned with the hope that there will be more Saturday Review Miss Gilliatt writes beautifully - not only are her stories touching and filled with insight, but her style is refreshingly clear. She celebrates the bittersweet human condition in prose that brings us her visions undistorted. It is a pleasure to recommend this excellent collection, rich with awareness and intelligence Los Angeles Times She is highly intelligent, economical, poignant, highly contemporary -- Anthony Burgess New York Times Book Review Perhaps because Miss Gilliatt has written two novels, these stories have the tense carrying power we all hope for in a book of short stories but more often find in a good novel. These are fresh, exact, passionate reports on the permanent pains of youth, the elegiac self-knowledge of age, fame, victory and defeat. Every story gives us not only the rare, old-fashioned pleasure of a well-told tale, but the exhilaration of having learned something new about the head and the heart -- Lillian Hellman Gilliatt prefers to let one quivering sentence stand for a night's tragedy, a scrap of dialogue represent an entire courtship, a paragraph encapsulate a lifetime... She's subversive, this spare and beautiful Miss Gilliatt. Get hooked on her COSMOPOLITAN
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