The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories - Hardcover

Davenport, Guy

4.21

62 ratings by Goodreads

9780865472952: The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865472955 ISBN 13: 9780865472952

Publisher: North Point Press, 1987

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Guy Davenport - regarded by the "New York Times" "one of our most gifted and versatile men of letters" - has produced in this collection of stories a remarkably harmonious synthesis of subjects and forms. Melding history, biography, botany, political theory, geology, and other interests, Davenport creates fictions that are complex but unified, mature, balanced, and resolved.

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From Library Journal:

Davenport writes in what might be called a cubist style. A typical story may be divided into dozens of fragments: snatches of philosophical banter; dense but lyrical lectures on botany and geology; erotic interludes in which young boys are forever "husking down" their underwear to "whack off." This latter obsession obscures Davenport's very real talent for aesthetic and intellectual fantasy. Consequently, the most beguiling item here, in which Davenport eschews his more tiresome habits, is "Pyrrhon of Elis," about a Greek philosopher profoundly skeptical of the "fine round world of people and things." For sophisticated readers. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

"Few American writers connect as many things as Guy Davenport, and few surpass him in the integrity of his connections... His fiction is a record of difficult and sensuous philosophical though, and his characters make brilliant literary and artistic judgments, but the center of gravity in his stories is a child's knowledge of the body's possibilities... Never less than the conversation, sometimes the monologue of a warm, gregarious, large-minded man." -- Partisan Review

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