The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee is a 1993 American novel by Matthew Stadler. The book is a striking example of postmodern narrative technique, in which different genres and styles of expression are mixed together.
Plot summary
Nicholas Dee, a young, anxiety-ridden history professor, lives in an unnamed American city battered by winter storms, plagued by crime, and patrolled by police in choppers and riot gear. Haunted by memories of his brilliant father and by the fear of loss, Nicholas takes shelter in his research: a history of the practice of insurance. One night, after a chance encounter with the police, he is made the guardian of a beautiful teenaged delinquent, Oscar Vega. But the boy is a part of a scheme to ensnare Nicholas, the tool of a mysterious female dwarf named Amelia Weathered, once the lover of Nicholas' father. Made an outlaw, Nicholas flees with Amelia, her young son Francis, and Oscar to the half-drowned country of Holland, where the boundaries between his historical research, his fantasies, and Amelia's schemes all begin to blend together.
Scattered throughout the novel are passages from Nicholas Dee's scholarly writing, chronicle of a seventeenth century Dutch opera-house, which was built in a coastal swamp on the advice of a fortune-teller and housed a single performance before being swept out to sea in a storm. The chronicle is intended by Dee to serve as a case study within his history of insurance. But by the end of the book, a personal narrative has emerged from Dee's impersonal history, the story of a man's friendship with a boy soprano.
Interpenetrating and linking the inner text by Nicholas Dee and the outer one by Matthew Stadler are snatches of music - extracts from the score of The Tempest, Henry Purcell's operatic setting of Shakespeare's play.
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Vanity Fair is a novel by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
Suspicion is a 1941 American romantic psychological thriller film noir directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine as a married couple. It also features Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty, Isabel Jeans, Heather Angel, and Leo G. Carroll. Suspicion is based on Francis Iles's novel Before the Fact (1932).
The Children's Crusade was a failed popular crusade by European Christians to establish a second Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Holy Land, said to have taken place in 1212. Although it is called the Children's Crusade, it never received the papal approval from Pope Innocent III to be an actual Crusade. The traditional narrative is likely conflated from a mix of factual and mythical events, which include the preaching of visions by a French boy and a German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery in Tunis. The crusaders of the real events on which the story is based left areas of Germany, led by Nicholas of Cologne, and Northern France, led by Stephen of Cloyes.
Crime fiction is a typically 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.
The Bone Collector is a 1999 American crime thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. The film is based on the 1997 crime novel of the same name written by Jeffery Deaver, and focuses the quadriplegic homicide detective and a newly-recruited patrol officer investigating the series of murders in New York City.
Arthur Cravan was a Swiss writer, poet, artist and boxer. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène Clara St. Clair. His brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photographer married to the Russian émigré artist Olga Sacharoff. His father's sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Irish poet Oscar Wilde. He changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France.
Riding in Cars with Boys is a 2001 American biographical film based on the autobiography of the same name by Beverly Donofrio, about a woman who overcame difficulties, including being a teen mother, and who later earned a master's degree. The movie's narrative spans the years 1961 to 1986. It stars Drew Barrymore, Steve Zahn, Brittany Murphy, and James Woods. It was the last film directed by Penny Marshall. Although the film is co-produced by Beverly Donofrio, many of its details differ from the book.
Allan Stein is a 1999 novel by Matthew Stadler. Its epigraph is a quotation from writer Gertrude Stein: "What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"
Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez's novella La Hojarasca. First published in 1955, it took seven years to find a publisher. Widely celebrated as the first appearance of Macondo, the fictitious village later made famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Leaf Storm is a testing ground for many of the themes and characters later immortalized in said book. It is also the title of a short story collection by García Márquez.
Matthew Stadler is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards. Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life. His essays, which have been published in magazines and museum catalogs, focus on architecture, urban planning and sprawl.
American Born Chinese is a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. Released in 2006 by First Second Books, it was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards in the category of Young People's Literature. It won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, the Publishers Weekly Comics Week Best Comic of the Year, the San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, the 2006/2007 Best Book Award from The Chinese American Librarians Association, and Amazon.com Best Graphic Novel/Comic of the Year. It also made the Booklist Top Ten Graphic Novel for Youth, the NPR Holiday Pick, and Time Top Ten Comic of the Year. It was colored by cartoonist Lark Pien, who received the 2007 Harvey Award for Best Colorist for her work on the book.
The Spanish Gardener is a 1950 novel by A. J. Cronin which tells the story of an American consul, Harrington Brande, who is posted to San Jorge on the Costa Brava, Spain with his young son Nicholas. The novel relates how Nicholas's innocent love for his father is destroyed by the latter's jealousy and vindictiveness when Nicholas forms a friendship with the young Spanish gardener, José Santero.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a 2007 novel written by Dominican American author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey in the United States, where Díaz was raised, and it deals with the Dominican Republic's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. The book chronicles the life of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as a curse that has plagued his family for generations.
Handle with Care (2009) is the 17th novel by the American author Jodi Picoult. It debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
David Stout was a journalist and author of mystery novels, two of which have been turned into TV movies, and of non-fiction about violent crime. For his first novel, Carolina Skeletons, he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel.
Death Comes to Pemberley is a 2011 mystery fiction novel by British writer P.D. James that continues Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice with a murder mystery.
The Assassin's Creed series is a collection of novels by various authors, set within the fictional universe of the Assassin's Creed video game franchise created by Ubisoft. The books are set across various time periods and, like the games, revolve around the secret war fought for centuries between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templar Order. The series includes both direct novelizations of several Assassin's Creed games, and books that function as standalone narratives, although some of these tie-in with one or more of the games in the franchise. British publishing house Penguin Books was responsible for the publication of most of the novels in the series, as well as their respective audiobook versions, until 2020, when Aconyte Books took over as the main publisher of the series.
Washington Black is the third novel by Canadian author Esi Edugyan. The novel was published in 2018 by HarperCollins in Canada and by Knopf Publishers internationally. A bildungsroman, the story follows the early life of George Washington "Wash" Black, chronicling his escape from slavery and his subsequent adventures. The novel won the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
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