Fiction
Gardner's best known novels include: The Sunlight Dialogues, about a brooding, disenchanted policeman who is asked to engage a madman fluent in classical mythology; Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view with a philosophical underlying; and October Light, about an aging and embittered brother and sister living and feuding together in rural Vermont. This last novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. Each book features brutish, isolated figures struggling for integrity and understanding in an unforgiving society.
Read more about this topic: John Gardner (American Writer)
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)