During the Reign of the Queen of Persia - Hardcover

Chase, Joan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860685365 ISBN 13: 9780860685364

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 1984

Synopsis

A panoramic account of the trials, tribulations, challenges, and joys shared by generations of one of Ohio's leading families, dominated by the resilient Lil Bradley, their own Queen of Persia

About this title

Review:

Moving, unusual and accomplished . . . During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad, the underside of the idyllic hometown, main-street, down-on-the-farm dream of Middle America.

(Margaret Atwood, The New York Times)

A beautifully written novel of pain and pride.

(Rita Mae Brown)

Joan Chase is like an archaeologist of our recent past and present, reading our traces back to us, showing us to ourselves freshly discovered and understood.

(Russell Banks)

Absorbing and wonderfully written.

(Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Brilliant and compelling.... A lush lyrical world of unsparing reality.

(The Plain Dealer (Cleveland))

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia offers an exoticism of the emotions and daily life exhilarated with the richness and evocativeness of poetry. It is also one of the few contemporary novels of women’s lives for which one need make no allowances, grant no compromised sympathy. Joan Chase hasn’t any message of visible politics, simply an artist’s passion for rendering reality accurately, a love of the tactile world, of sensual experience, and a willingness to confront, without resolving, her characters’ grievous ambiguities.... Splendid and durable.

(The Washington Post Book World)

Eloquent, compelling, and honest.

(San Francisco Chronicle Review)

Appealing and original.... Read the novel once for the characters, sorting out the strands of their lives, seen through eyes gone from innocence to knowing. It should be read again immediately for its language and imagery, the memory of a dappled sunshine, of the indomitable fierce Gram, and for its understanding of an endangered species called the American family.

(Detroit Free Press)

Remarkably original.

(Star-Telegram (Forth Worth))

An absolutely first-class novel.... The candid viewing of events through four girls’ eyes is a wonderfully effective narrative technique that does much to give the book its rough-grained, realistic texture.... The novel, sparely elegant in style and precise in nuance, turns over our romanticized notions of our rural past.

(Chicago Sun-Times)

About the Author:

JOAN CHASE was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN / Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase is also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991). She lives in Massachusetts.
 

MEGHAN O’ROURKE, a former editor at The New Yorker and Slate, is the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, and teaches at NYU and Princeton.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0860685365
• ISBN 13: 9780860685364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224