Bøger af MacDonald Harris

Here is a delight: MacDonald Harris's colourful, fanciful, and moving Herma, the story of a willful young woman who conquers the musical world of the Belle Epoque. Herma is many things: a glamorous story of a singer who rises from the choir of a country church to stardom at the Paris Opera: the parallel adventures of her agent and friendly enemy Fred Hite, filled with the excitement of the early days of aviation; and a provocative sexual intrigue whose twinned her and heroine, not brother and sister, are forbidden to each other by the secret that lies at the center of their odd and intimate relationship. From its evocative beginnings in the pastoral Southern California of the turn of the century, Herma moves on to larger worlds: first the brash, adolescent San Francisco of the period, then the Earthquake, then the international world of opera in Paris at the most luxurious, opulent, and decadent moment of its history. Erotic, bejeweled, crowded with incident and a big, vivid cast of characters, Herma is MacDonald Harris's richest and most complex novel.

A merchant seaman is the sole survivor when his ship is sunk in a battle in the South Pacific. Badly burned, he is stripped of every shred of identity and cast into the sea, naked, faceless, nameless. Rescued and lying in a Pearl Harbor hospital, he is mistakenly identified as the missing Lt. Ben Davenant by Davenant's wife. In the moment, the man decides to go along, to take on Davenant's identity, to return with her to California and take on his life.Mortal Leap may remind some readers of the story of Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men. What does it mean to abandon one life completely and step into another in midstream? To step into a marriage, a house, a way of life, all of which are utterly new and unfamiliar? And what do you do when someone from your old life shows up?Decades before Mad Men, MacDonald Harris created a story that we all know but have never heard before. Out of print for decades, Mortal Leap has become a rare and coveted cult classic, the few remaining copies passed along from reader to reader. Now, Boiler House Press's Recovered Books series makes this remarkable book available again.

Like Graham Greene and Mary McCarthy before him, MacDonald Harris has written a thriller. And like them, he brings to his story the alchemical talent of a first-class novelist: The Treasure of Sainte Foy is not only gripping, but also transcendent.In the picturesque, isolated French village of Conques stands the Abbey of Sainte Foy. The church houses a priceless medieval treasure whose centerpiece is a magnificent, three-foot-high statue of the holy martyr Sainte Foy, bejeweled and covered with gold, its strange alabaster eyes gazing ahead as if at a nearby invisible world. To a small group of political terrorists in Toulouse, the treasure is an irresistible target. Working with them is Patrick, a disaffected American art historian, who recruits into the band Marie-Ange, the guide to the church. We see their methodical preparations for the robbery, the growing attraction between Patrick and Marie-Ange, the implacable pursuit of the police—all cool, dramatic, and passionate as a Bogart film. But we also sense the mysterious underworld of the Languedoc, a region of heretics and saints, criminals and martyrs; the stakes of the novel subtly change and ramify; we are caught up in a gorgeous and mystical endgame as the forces of retribution close in; we get the uncanny feeling that at play in the novel are forces unseen and unseeable. What is really at play, of course, is the masterful hand of MacDonald Harris. A native Californian, Harris is best known for The Balloonist, nominated for the National Book Award and translated into half a dozen language, and Pandora's Galley, his mesmerizing tale of the last days of the Venetian Republic. In The Treasure of Sainte Foy, Harris has written a novel that is spellbinding in every sense of the world.

Harris sets his tale against the decadent eccentricities of a wealthy California beach community. At the center is Harry, a handsome gallery owner, an epicurean lover of all things beautiful, a man who counted his late wife among his most valuable possessions. When he hires Velda Venn, an unsophisticated yet powerfully sexual housekeeper, the order of his exquisite household is gradually subverted. Like the pull of the ocean waves outside his window, Velda draws Harry from calm self-absorption to erotic obsession. He must possess her - and a spectacular painting that changes everything, a painting that seems the very mirror of his strange, uncontrollable desire.