【商品详情】
书名：Winesburg, Ohio 小城畸人
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1050L
作者：Sherwood Anderson
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2005
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451529954
商品尺寸：10.6 x1.7x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：272
Winesburg, Ohio《小城畸人》是舍伍德·安德森颇具盛名的作品。小说以20世纪20年代的美国小城温斯堡为背景，由相互独立又联系的短篇故事构成。这些故事描写了小城各式各样的人物，他们的共性就在于人物精神的怪异。作者试图通过这些描写，来呈现资本主义急速发展给人们精神层面带来的冲击，表现这些在社会结构变化中变得支离破碎的价值。
《小镇畸人》是美国文学史上堪称经典的一部短篇小说集，它开创了新的“美国式的写作传统”。作者舍伍德·安德森对这些怪人给予了深切的同情，他们的被误解真实地反应了二十世纪工业化初期的美国传统与现代的交锋所产生的困惑和思索。
本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，由Irving Howe作序，Dean Koontz后记，内容完整无删减，书本小巧便携。
“A work of love, an attempt to break down the walls that divide one person from another, and also, in its own fashion, a celebration of small-town life in the lost days of goodwill and innocence.” —Malcolm Cowley
“He was the father of my whole generation of writers.”—William Faulkner
Inspired by Sherwood Anderson's Midwestern boyhood and hisobservations in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chicago, the looselyconnected stories inWinesburg, Ohio gave birth to the American story cycle, for which William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and later writer were forever indebted. Defying the sensibilities of his time, Anderson omitted nothing sexual, harsh, or aberrant; instead he embraced frankness, truth, and the hidden depths everyone possesses. Here we meet young George Willard, a newspaper reporter with dreams; Kate Swift, the schoolteacher who attempts to seduce him; Wing Biddlebaum, a berry picker whose handsare the source of both his renown and shame; Alice Hindman, who has one last, shocking adventure; and all the other complex human beings whose portraits brought American literature into the modern age. Their stories make up a classic and place its author alongside the best of American writers.
With an Introduction by Irving Howe and a New Afterword by Dean Koontz
荒原上的小镇里到处都是迷惘忧愁的怪人。医生在诊所里修建着真理的金字塔，牧师经受着灵与肉的煎熬，失意的画家沉迷于臆想中的幻象，满怀冒险憧憬的少女虚度芳华。挣扎抑或妥协，痛苦还是麻木，终于，年轻人走出了破茧成蝶的一步。
舍伍德·安德森（Sherwood Anderson，1876~1941年），美国二十世纪伟大的作家，被誉为“现代美国文学的先驱者”。他的作品深刻地影响了海明威、福克纳、菲茨杰拉德、斯坦贝克、考德威尔等一系列大师级作家，可称之为大师的老师。其代表作有短篇小说集《小城畸人》（Winesburg,Ohio，1919年），《鸡蛋的胜利》（The Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories，1921年），《林中之死》（Death inthe Woods and Other Stories，1933年）和长篇小说《暗笑》（Dark Laughter，1925年）等。《暗笑》是作者生前非常畅销的—部作品。
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was an American short story writer and novelist. He was raised in the small town of Clyde, Ohio, served in the Spanish-American War, and managed a paint factory before abandoning his job and his wife for Chicago and the writer’s life. He was forty before his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, was published in the peak of the Chicago Renaissance. Winesburg, Ohio, his masterpiece, appeared in 1919. His other novels include Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925), but his short story collections were more successful. Two of his best are The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men (1923). After moving to Marion, Virginia, in 1927, he owned and edited two newspapers. He died in Panama during a trip to South America.
Irving Howe (1920–93) was born in New York, and he attended City College before serving in the U.S. Army in World War II. He was well-known both for his social activism and his literary and cultural criticism, and in 1954, he helped found the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death. Among his enduring works are Sherwood Anderson, Decline of the New, Politics of the Novel, and World of Our Fathers.
Dean Koontz was born in Everett, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Bedford. He won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition when he was twenty and has been writing ever since. His books are published in thirty-eight languages, and he has sold more than 450 million copies to date.
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer's room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long life, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called 'The Book of the Grotesque.' It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
