Babel Tower (100 page)

Fiction/Literature

Frederica’s husband’s violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.

Fiction/Literature

Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire,
The Biographer’s Tale
is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.

Fiction/Literature

When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.

Fiction/Literature

In this collection of fairy tales for adults, the title story describes the relationship between a world renowned scholar of the art of storytelling and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle found in an Istanbul bazaar. Byatt renders this interaction of the natural and supernatural not only convincing, but inevitable.

Fiction/Literature

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince. Striving to master color and line, a painter solves his artistic problems when a magical water snake appears in his pool. Elegantly crafted and suffused with wisdom, these tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.

Fiction/Literature

The Game
portrays the sibling rivalry between Cassandra and Julia who, as little girls, played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled after Arthurian romance. Now they are hostile strangers, until a man they loved and suffered over reenters their lives.

Fiction/Literature

In this innovative book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré bring their sensibilities to bear on six novels they have loved: Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette
, George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda
, Willa Cather’s
The Professor’s House
, Iris Murdoch’s
An Unofficial Rose
, and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
.

Literary Criticism

Each of these narratives is inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, and each is about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling. Beautifully written, intensely observed,
The Matisse Stories
is fiction of spellbinding authority.

Fiction/Literature

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath, Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison, or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Literary Criticism

These short stories explore the fragile ties between generations and the dizzying abyss of loss and the memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and return to our own with knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

Fiction/Literature

A tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided,
The Virgin in the Garden
is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.

Fiction/Literature

Frederica lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, the University is planning a conference on body and mind, and students are establishing an Anti-University.
A Whistling Woman
is a thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism and their effects on ordinary lives.

Fiction/Literature

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