"Stoner" by John Williams
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Welcome! Ours is a chill group filled with good people, good books, and good drinks. Did you read the whole book? Amazing! Did you only read some of it? Totally fine, please still join us (just be warned, there will be spoilers)! Did you hear about this the day before and didn't read it at all? You're always welcome—and bring a recommendation with you!
At the end of our time, we'll go around the circle and share our recommendations and decide which wins out for our December book.
• • •
Fiction | Literary | Psychological | Family Life
• • •
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, so 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’s 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.
***pasted from thenookcf.com: https://tinyurl.com/47c6dvnz
CONTENT WARNINGS: https://tinyurl.com/7kytka2v
At the end of our time, we'll go around the circle and share our recommendations and decide which wins out for our December book.
• • •
Fiction | Literary | Psychological | Family Life
• • •
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, so 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’s 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.
***pasted from thenookcf.com: https://tinyurl.com/47c6dvnz
CONTENT WARNINGS: https://tinyurl.com/7kytka2v
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