Stoner
John Williams, 1965
A farm boy becomes a literature professor in Missouri and learns what a quiet life can hold and cost.
John Williams
Stoner sold modestly on publication in 1965 and became a bestseller in Europe decades later, long after John Williams's death.
Feels like melancholy, tenderness and adventure.
Love as something built moment by moment, not a state you fall into.
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart. Books by John Williams
Authors with a similar feel
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
BookFeed is a feed of real passages from real books. It learns what moves you and finds your next book.
Open BookFeedFree, no sign-up.