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  • Published: 1 March 2001
  • ISBN: 9780141922942
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The Pastures of Heaven




Each of these delightful interconnected tales is devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects that one particular family has on them all. Steinbeck tackles two important literary traditions here; American naturalism, with its focus on the conflict between natural instincts and the demand to conform to society's norms, and the short story cycle. Set in the heart of 'Steinbeck land', the lush Californian valleys.

  • Published: 1 March 2001
  • ISBN: 9780141922942
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in 17 February 1902. After studying English at Stanford University, he held several jobs including working as a hod-carrier, apprentice painter, laboratory assistant, ranch hand, fruit-picker, construction worker at Madison Square Gardens, New York, and reporter for the New York American. In 1935 he became a full-time writer and was a special writer for the United States Army Air Force during World War II.

Among his most renowned works are Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

In 1926 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as a mark of his outstanding contribution to literature, his unquestionable popularity and his versatility. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize, Steinbeck gave his view of authorship: 'The ancient omission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our may grevious faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love.'

John Steinbeck died on 20th December 1968.

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Praise for The Pastures of Heaven

Overwhelming - just buy it for its beauty

New Statesman

A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before...the message is universal

The Times

It is a rich, provocative and hopeful vision of the world, stuffed full of drama and surprise-its literary lineage - the ease with which spirits move through every day life - is from ancient Greece and medieval romances

Independent

Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose... When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them

Linda Grant, Independent on Sunday

This is a book to generate apostles. People will be moved and, with stars in their eyes, will pass on the word

Time Out

The Famished Road is a masterpiece if one ever existed

Jay Parini, Boston Sunday Globe

Azaro says that his is "a spiritchild nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth comes blood and betrayal". There's a glory in that. Azaro's scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious in its own right, too

Angela Carter, Sunday Times

In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child

Michael Palin