Stoner

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Stoner

Written by: John Williams

Narrated by: Robin Field

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William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

John WilliamsRobin FieldBlackstone Audio, Inc.

Classics

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Psychological

Marriage

Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Marriage

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What the critics say

“A perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away." (Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review )

“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” ( New Yorker)

“An exquisite study, bleak as Hopper, of a hopelessly honest academic at a meretricious Midwestern university. I had not known…that the kind of unsparing portrait of failed marriage shown in Stoner existed before John Cheever.” ( Los Angeles Times)

Most Relevant

I heard about this book through a recommendation. I was caught by the author’s use of deep honest truths throughout the novel, and I found that the premise - the life story of an wholly unremarkable man - to be a brilliant backdrop to illuminate this aspect of the author’s writing.

Just a remarkable novel, and a beautiful telling of an otherwise mundane man.