泛读的作家与作品.doc

The first seven years ：
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), American novelist and short-story writer, most of whose books focus on the Jewish experience in America. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Malamud was educated at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Beginning in 1961 he taught at Bennington College. Malamud's first novel, The Natural (1952), reworks the legend of the Holy Grail as an allegorical fantasy about a star baseball player (see Allegory). His second novel, The Assistant (1957), is concerned with Jewish themes and reflects the sad, impoverished Brooklyn scenes of his childhood. The Fixer (1966), for which Malamud received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a poignant novel (based on a true story) of the suffering of a Russian Jewish workman sentenced unjustly to prison; it demonstrates how human beings can come through suffering to an affirmative view of life. The Tenants (1971), about the relationship between a Jewish man and a black man, deals with inner-city tensions. Malamud's later novels include Dubin's Lives (1979), about a writer of biographies, and God's Grace (1982). Malamud's short stories mix an abiding compassion for Jewish life with subtle touches of wry humor. They have been collected in The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First (1963), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), and Rembrandt's Hat (1973); a complete collection, The Stories of Bernard Malamud, was published in 1983.

Through the tunnel:
多丽丝·莱辛（Doris Lessing，1919年10月22日—）是当代英国最重要的作家之一，被誉为继伍尔芙之后最伟大的女性作家，并几次获得诺贝尔文学奖提名以及多个世界级文学奖项。 在2007年10月11日，瑞典皇家科学院诺贝尔奖委员会宣布将2007年度诺贝尔文学奖授予这位英国女作家。Doris lessing多丽丝·莱辛荣获2007年诺贝尔文学奖，成为该奖项自1901年创立以来最年长的获奖者。诺贝尔委员会颁奖给莱辛的理由是：“她以怀疑主义、激情和想象力审视一个分裂的文明，她登上了这方面女性体验的史诗巅峰。”莱辛笔耕五十多年，是位多产作家。除了长篇小说，还著有诗歌、散文、剧本、短篇小说等。
Notes:
convent n.女修道院emancipated adj.被解放的fatalistic adj.宿命论的
martyrdom n.殉难；殉道subjugation n.屈服；从属

Mr Loveday’s little outing:
Evelyn Waugh伊夫林·沃，（1903—）英国作家，全名阿瑟·伊夫林·圣约翰·沃，1903年10月28日生于英国汉普斯特德。其父阿瑟·沃系英国著名出版商兼文学批评家，也是一位虔诚的英国圣公会教徒。伊夫林·沃从小就受到两方面的环境薰陶：宗教与书本。沃的父母给孩子读故事，并与他们一起讨论作品。沃在7岁时就写过一个题为《赛马的诅咒》的短箱小说，并被收入一个成人作品集中出版。他和他的哥哥长大后都成为作家，与儿时的家庭影响关系颇大。沃上中学时，被父亲送到圣公会教会学校，每天早晚两次礼拜，周末则要去3次。据沃本人回忆，他当时并不觉得这种宗教仪式过于繁琐。1921年至1924年，沃在牛津大学的赫特福德学院学习，1924年遂转入希瑟利艺术学校学习绘画。不久之后，沃便发现绘画亦非其爱好，又去当中学教员，可两年之内被开除了3次，从此开始酗酒，并企图自杀。直到1927年，沃才正视现实，开始从事家人所擅长的文学创作。他先试笔创作了数篇短篇，还写了传记文学，1928年发表了第一部长篇小说《衰落与瓦解》，一举成名。此后，沃专心写作，先后出版了长篇小说20余部，短篇小说集两部，以及书信集数部，其中被誉为佳作的有：《衰落与瓦解》，《一抔土》（1934）、《旧地重游》（1945）、《荣誉之剑》（1965）等。沃曾于40年代后期为《旧地重游》搬上银幕一事访问好莱坞，并根据此间搜集的素材创作了《受爱戴的》（1948），这是他最畅销的长篇小说之一。
　　出身文学世家的Evelyn waugh最初表现出叛逆家庭传统的倾向。20年代早期就读于牛津大学时，他更感兴趣的是装饰艺术而非文学，但因成绩差而被迫离校，转入一家艺术学校，后来又做过小学校长，两年内被三个学校辞退。这一连串的挫折最终将waugh拨归正途，他迟疑地拿起笔，开始了一个漫长的过程。四十年后，这个“英语文学史上最具摧毁力和最有成果的讽刺小说家，以及最伟大的文体家”回首当年，一言以蔽之：“我一开始是显然是个傻瓜。”Waugh在25岁时结束了他的傻瓜生涯，小说《衰亡》以其讽刺锋芒和叛逆姿态引起文坛关注。继之以《邪恶的躯体》和《黑祸》，风格如故，技巧与内涵篇篇推进，奠定了他作为一流讽刺小说家的文学声名。《衰亡》是一部带有喜剧色彩的讽刺小说。描写天真直率的主人公paul被牛津大学开除后，进入社会开始自立的过程中的离奇遭遇。Paul在一连串混乱而堕落的事件中是一个被动的观测者和承受者：恶在滋生，善被惩罚，根本没有行为标准可以遵循；他生活在一个“离道德观和离童话一样遥远的世界中。”他是waugh喜剧中典型的叙事者形象：居中而立，无所不察，却又退避而求中立，被愤怒和荒唐感所围绕。

Possessions:
George Ewart Evans (1909, Abercynon, South Wales – 1988) was a Welsh-born schoolteacher, writer and folklorist who became a dedicated collector of oral history and oral tradition in the East Anglian countryside from the 1940s to 1970s, and produced eleven books of collections of these materials.
After serving in the Royal Air Force with wireless equipment during the Second World War, he moved briefly to London, and then in 1947 to the remote Suffolk village of Blaxhall, where his wife taught in the school. He then began to write, first stories, poetry and film scripts for the BBC, and then writing a book about the people of the village of Blaxhall. This work (Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay) was, after many rejections, published by Faber and Faber in 1956, and the same house published the ten further books of similar character which Evans wrote over the next three decades.
The Evans family lived relatively simply, moving their home in the neighbourhood to Needham Market and Helmingham to follow the teaching posts, and at his wife's retirement they settled down finally in Brooke, a small Norfolk village, where George continued to write. Evans made extensive collections of oral history on tape relating to East Anglia, its village life, rural culture and dialect in a painstaking and sympathetic way, gathering anecdotes of the trades, the poverty, the migrant workers, and the pre-modern rural way of life which was then still lingering in that comparatively sequestered corner of England.
The legacy:
　弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙（Virginia Woolf‎1882年1月25日—1941年3月28日）。 英国女作家，批判家，意识流小说的代表人物之一。《墙上的斑点》是她第一篇典型的意识流作品。（被认为是二十世纪现代主义与女性主义的先锋之一。在两次世界大战期间，伍尔芙是伦敦文学界的核心人物，她同时也是布卢姆茨伯里派（Bloomsbury Group‎）的成员之一。其最知名的小说包括《戴洛维夫人》（Mrs. Dalloway‎）、《灯塔行》（To the Lighthouse‎）、《雅各的房间》（Jakob's Room‎）。最近关于伍尔芙的研究大多关注于三个方向：女权主义、同性恋倾向及抑郁症病史。

The bet:
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Антон Павлович Чехов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕɛxəf]; 29 January [O.S. 17 January] 1860 – 15 July [O.S. 2 July] 1904) was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature.[1] His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.[2][3] Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."[4]
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a special challenge to the acting ensemble[5] as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."[6]
Chekhov had at first written stories only for the money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.[7] His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.[8] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

The blue cross:
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Though he considered himself a mere "rollicking journalist," he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people--such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells--with whom he vehemently disagreed.
Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was one of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His 1922 Eugenics and Other Evils attacked what was at that time the most progressive of all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once "reactionary" views.
His poetry runs the gamut from the comic The Logical Vegetarian to dark and serious ballads. During the dark days of 1940, when Britain stood virtually alone against the armed might of Nazi Germany, these lines from his 1911 Ballad of the White Horse were often quoted:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors and historical figures like Charles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His "Father Brown" mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read and adapted for television
His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books like the 1910 What's Wrong with the World he advocated a view called "Distributism" that is best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though not known as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a "genuine" nationalism for India. Orthodoxy belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity he found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other books in that same series include his 1905 Heretics and its sequel Orthodoxy and his 1925 The Everlasting Man.
Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. During his life he published 69 books and at least another ten have been published after his death. Many of those books are still in print.

The night the ghost got in:
James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American author, cartoonist and celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his contributions (both cartoons and short stories) to The New Yorker magazine.
In addition to his other fiction, Thurber wrote over seventy-five fables, most of which were collected in Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956). These usually conformed to the fable genre to the extent that they were short, featured anthropomorphic animals as main characters, and ended with a moral as a tagline.
Thurber's prose for The New Yorker and other venues also included numerous humorous essays. A favorite subject, especially toward the end of his life, was the English language. Pieces on this subject included "The Spreading 'You Know'," which decried the overuse of that pair of words in conversation, "The New Vocabularianism," "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?" and many others. Thurber's short pieces, whether stories, essays or something in between, were referred to as "casuals" by Thurber and the staff of The New Yorker.[8] Thurber wrote a biographical memoir about The New Yorker's founder and publisher, Harold Ross, titled The Years with Ross (1958).
Thurber also wrote a five-part New Yorker series, between 1947 and 1948, examining in depth the radio soap opera phenomenon, based on near-constant listening and researching over the same period. Leaving nearly no element of these programs unexamined, including their writers, producers, sponsors, performers, and listeners alike, Thurber re-published the series in his anthology, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948) under the section title "Soapland." The series was one of the first to examine such a pop culture phenomenon in depth and with just enough traces of Thurber's wit to make it more than just a sober piece of what would later be called investigative reporting.
An annual award, the Thurber Prize, begun in 1997, honors outstanding examples of American humor. In 2008, The Library of America selected Thurber’s New Yorker story “A Sort of Genius” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.