All Souls - Hardcover

Schutt, Christine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014493 ISBN 13: 9780151014491

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

As Astra Dell, a senior suffering from cancer, fights for her life in the hospital, her privileged classmates at Siddons, a posh private school in New York City, struggle with their own concerns over boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and Astra Dell. By the author of the critically acclaimed Florida.

About this title

Review:

"Schutt''s impressionistic style, with its extraordinary gift for exquisite economy, carries the day and creates a mood and tone that are hauntingly unforgettable." (Starred)

"[B]eautifully written... there isn''t a boring sentence in here."

"A very literary look at a private girls'' school on the Upper East Side."

"[P]roves the puffy prep-school genre can shoulder real emotional weight -- and that indeed, it sometimes should."

"Readers who love language and appreciate description will find All Souls worth reading.... Anyone who wants to read a high school story that''s about more than just life as a model/fashionista/mean girl will enjoy this book."

"In her latest novel, Christine Schutt once again proves herself an astute observer of human nature...Schutt seamlessly marries these girls to the unpredictable, indifferent threat of random fate, a clear, precise vision of privilege marred by tragedy."

"One of the best private school novels to appear in recent years...With commendations from John Ashbery, and sentences that often demand rereading, Christine Schutt has mainly appealed to reader who don''t begrudge a prose its small risks. In ''All Souls'', her second novel, she makes a bid for wider appeal. Describing the small cosmos around an elite Upper East Side girls'' school, Ms. Schutt imagines -- or penetrates -- an exclusive world at once sexy and lamentable, predictable but still mysterious. Her subject is not any one aspect of private school culture, but its almost intangible totality, the thing that gives a school, in all its decentered complexity, an identity. Miraculousl, she achieves this, and in a novel that is a model of succintness."

Set in a girls' school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, this book is a wonderfully written, touching story...an extraordinarily captivating take on the teachers', parents', and teens' troubled worlds...refreshing for this genre.

"Refreshingly strange.Schutt''s work... is fiercely intimate, laying bare the jagged lives of girls and women.... Schutt''s roving, kaleidoscopic vision-- often wickedly funny-- captures the quivering of all these souls in the heat of mortality.... It''s the foreign land of teenage girldom--where bodies relentlessly blossom and friendships resemble toruous love affairs-- that Schutt gets especially, achingly right.... ''All Souls'' is shot through with [Virginia] Woolf''s lyrical, restless spirit... The result is a bold, sharp story about teenage girls, class and illness, about those moments when we achieve the miracle of human connection -- and those when we don''t."

Praise for ALL SOULS "[M]asterfully paced... Schutt's writing is sharp as ever, with a keen eye for life's everyday grotesqueries.... Schutt continues to capture the messiness and confusions particular to adolescence, but in "All Souls," new terrain refreshes this writer's astringent voice."--TimeOut New York (four stars)

"Readers who love language and appreciate description will find "All Souls" worth reading.... Anyone who wants to read a high school story that's about more than just life as a model/fashionista/mean girl will enjoy this book."" -- ElleGirl.com

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About the Author:

CHRISTINE SCHUTT is the author of the short-story collections A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer and Nightwork—named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement (London) Best Book of the Year—as well as the novel Florida, a 2004 National Book Award Finalist. Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0151014493
• ISBN 13: 9780151014491
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 223