Elementals by A S Byatt

Elementals by A S Byatt

Expertly navigating between the real and the fantastical, A. S. Byatt offers a magnificent new collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites -- passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice -- clash and converge.

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artistic problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy English woman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafted and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.

Lewis Carroll, creator of the brilliantly witty Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford don with a stammer.

He was born at Daresbury, Cheshire on January 27, 1832, son of a vicar. As the eldest boy among eleven children, he learned early to amuse his siblings by writing and editing family magazines. He was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics from1855 to 1881. In 1861 he was ordained as a deacon.

Dodgson's entry into the world of fiction was accidental. It happened one golden afternoon as he escorted his colleague's three daughters on a trip up the river Isis. There he invented the story that might have been forgotten if not for the persistence of the youngest girl, Alice Liddell. Thanks to her, and to her encouraging friends, Alice was published in 1865, with drawings by the political cartoonist, John Tenniel. After Alice, Dodgson wrote Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), Through the Looking-Glass (1871), The Hunting of Shark (1876, and Rhyme? and Reason? (1883).

As a mathematician Dodgson is best known for Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879). He was also a superb children's photographer, who captured the delicate, sensuous beauty of such little girls as Alice Liddell and Ellen Terry, the future actress. W.H. Auden called him one of the best portrait photographer of the century. Dodgson was also an inventor; his projects included a game of arithmetic croquet, a substitute for glue, and an apparatus for making notes in the dark. Though he sought publication for his light verse, he never dreamed his true gift-telling stories to children-merited publication or lasting fame, and he avoided publicity scrupulously Charles Dodgson died in 1898 of influenza.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375705755
ISBN 10	0375705759
Title	Elementals
Author	A S Byatt
Series	Vintage International
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage
Year published	2000-07-11
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable