For Love & Money: A Writing Life 1969-1989 - Hardcover

Raban, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060161663 ISBN 13: 9780060161668

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1989

Synopsis

The author describes his life as a writer, his experiences sailing around Europe, and his observations on literature

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Best known for his travel writing ( Arabia and Old Glory ), Raban has also been a teacher and critic, and in these recollections covering 20 years he integrates selections from his book reviews and occasional pieces with autobiographical musings as "Shelleyblake." Raban's world encompasses English and American literature (from Byron and Thackeray to Robert Lowell and Tom Wolfe), travel writers (Stevenson, Freya Stark, Belloc and Edmund Wilson), the English cyclone of 1987, the delights of fishing and his own experiences in the Cape Verde Islands and the Florida Keys. In this storehouse of literary pleasures his remarks about writers are vigorous and unexpected: "Trollope's exploration of social terror is in some ways very close to Kafka's exploration of psychological terror"; Evelyn Waugh makes the Sitwells sound absurd "by reporting on them with the deadly accuracy of an unsmiling child"; Huckleberry Finn is not a masterpiece in the ordinary sense, but "it is the only novel in American literature that has the permanent, enchanting and mysterious power of an ancient myth."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

These witty and incisive essays by the English author of the best-selling Old Glory: An American Voyage ( LJ 9/15/81) amply demonstrate that Raban is a master of the vanishing art of literary journalism. Whether written to order, or for the unremunerated pleasure of writing for its own sake, Raban's prose is consistently well wrought and cogent. Widely read and traveled, he discourses on subjects as diverse as sailing, the literary life, Florida, childhood, London, playwriting, and various masters of modern British and American fiction. In an age of overly hermetic criticism, it is refreshing to encounter a writer who finds his ideal audience in the "common reader." Admirers of Raban's other books, or of just plain good writing, will find this highly satisfying.
- Christine Stenstrom, New York Law Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0060161663
• ISBN 13: 9780060161668
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344