Evan S. Connell

Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as "one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers," wrote what continues to be the most reliable--and compulsively readable--account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist's eye for the story and detail to re-vreate the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

Alternate-cover edition for ISBN 0865470561 / 9780865470569 can be found here The wife of a successful lawyer in 1930s Kansas City, India Bridge, tries to cope with her dissatisfaction with an easy, though empty, life.Before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique there was Mrs. Bridge, an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testified to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life. India Bridge, the title character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has the gall to dry his hands on one, and earnestly attempts to control her daughters with pronouncements such as "Now see here, young lady ... in the morning one doesn't wear earrings that dangle." Though her life is increasingly filled with leisure and plenty, she can't shuffle off vague feelings of dissatisfaction, confusion, and futility. Evan S. Connell, who also wrote the twinned novel Mr. Bridge, builds a world with tiny brushstrokes and short, telling vignettes.

Walter Bridge is an ambitious lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he senses that his family needs something, even when what they need is more of him and less of his money. Affluence, material assets, and comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void within - not the skeleton in the closet but a black hole swallowing the whole household.

The 1960 news of riots, war, unheard-of behavior, and rampant crime crowds the papers and the airwaves. Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, Earl Summerfield hunkers down in his cramped San Francisco apartment and keeps a diary that is a scratched record of a world going to pieces. The words he overhears, the words he wants to say, swim in his head, turning into fantasies of ambition, love, and retribution. He is sorry for himself. He is angry at everyone. He takes to going out at night, slipping into other people's houses. He is looking for something, and he fixes on one woman.

God wills it! The year is 1095 and the most prominent leaders of the Christian world are assembled in a meadow in France. Deus lo volt! This cry is taken up, echoes forth, is carried on. The Crusades have started, and wave after wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land. Two centuries long, it will become the defining war of the Western world.

Acclaimed author Evan S. Connell sends us through the complete experience of a man initially intrigued and then enslaved by a curious interest, a rapt fixation, and the becoming of a connoisseur. The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre-Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden affinity for a little figurine, Muhlbach succumbs to his intrigue and, thirty dollars later, begins his journey as a connoisseur.With superb delivery and subtle clarity, Connell allows us to see and feel Muhlbach’s emerging mania, with its impending tension and sudden exhilaration. He illustrates how a new fixation alters our lens on life and shapes our actions.

Here are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the great explorers, eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course," Connell says, "because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard."

A portrayal of a safe, desperate, middle class American marriage, as seen from both sides. Mr Bridge is dominated by reason and common sense, but is vaguely aware that something is missing from his life. Mrs Bridge, now that her children have grown up, is slowly going mad from boredom.

Book by Connell, Evan S.

A collection of anecdotes, scraps of history, arcane lore, and unfamiliar quotations on the condition of man and the world he lives in.

Book by Connell, Evan S.

The author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt probes the mind of the Spanish painter, reconstructing the violent, repressive Spain he called home and charting his powerful influence on Western art.This biography of Francisco Goya breaks the mold--recounting with stunning immediacy the uncommon genius behind the renowned Spanish painter. Darkly brilliant and casually masterful in turn, Francisco Goya changed art forever. During the days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya painted royalty, street urchins, and demons with the same brush, bringing his own distinctive touch to each. This unusual man and his ghastly times are the perfect subject for Evan S. Connell, one of our greatest and least conventional writers. Introducing a wealth of detail and a cast of comic characters--a motley group of dukes, queens, and artists, as lewd and incorrigible a crew as history has ever produced--Connell has conjured Goya's life with wit, erudition, and a sparkling imagination.

A collection of poems in which Evan S Connell meditates on the follies, cruelties and frailties of humankind.

Although he may be best known for his novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, or perhaps for his brilliant biography of Custer, Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell is an undisputed master of the short story. His restraint, concision, and perfect pitch lend themselves beautifully to the form, and he intuitively senses when to explain and when to let silence stand in speech’s stead. Lost in Uttar Pradesh collects new work by Connell along with some of his earlier masterpieces. Memorable characters like the corpulent Mr. Bemis, Katia and her lion, and a wanderer back from Spain ring true not because their stories are filled with monumental events but because they center around seemingly insignificant events that somehow remain in the mind. Through Connell’s mastery, the most trivial happening, the voice that speaks only once, resonates far beyond the final page.

In a fictional tour de force of rich historical re-creation and spectacular prose, Evan Connell imagines the journals of seven alchemists: Paracelsus, the famous sixteenth-century alchemist, begins the remarkably musical narration, which then continues from the point of view of, by turns, a devout novice, an elderly skeptic, a conscientious physician, a Christian historian, a revolutionary, and a philosopher. Each offers a unique lens for viewing Paracelsus, alchemy, and the world.As in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose , the mystery and occult texture of a historical setting come eerily alive. Though ancient in style, the voices of Connell's diarists are trenchantly clear. Like lead into gold, these imagined contemplations of medieval alchemists transmute into a modern, relevant book filled with sublime wisdom, hope, and healing philosophy. A work of high, uncompromising art in which thought is the real alchemy, The Alchemist's Journal is an acute yet forgiving study of humanity by on of America's greatest writers.

A master of short fiction, Evan Connell's stories go right to the heart of the American character. Collected here are 56 stories gathered from his writing career, some heartbreaking and some comic. "A finely wrought study of human nature, masterfully blending its flaws and virtues."--Seattle Times.

Stories portray turning points in the lives of characters, including a tramp watching a dying woman, a pilot shot down over the ocean, and an amputee in a naval hospital

Hardcover

His third book and second novel about a young Naval Air Force cadet's coming of age in the Second World War.

Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in us all. Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley (a Victorian naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, and guest of cannibals, and Ibn Batuta (an indefatigable explorer of the fourteenth century whose travels in the Arab world and beyond made 'the journey of Marco Polo look like a stroll around the block'). 'There's no end to the list, of course,' Connell adds, 'because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard.'

Light rubbing and a very tiny chip to the tip of the jacket spine, else near fine with price intact and no markings. First state of Connell's first book, with author's portrait on jacket back. In a Brodart jacket cover.

By the author of MR. BRIDGES. A clean, unmarked and unclipped copy.