Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World - Hardcover

Doerr, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416540016 ISBN 13: 9781416540014

Publisher: Scribner, 2007

Synopsis

Anthony Doerr has received many awards -- from the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Library Association. Then came the Rome Prize, one of the most prestigious awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and with it a stipend and a writing studio in Rome for a year. Doerr learned of the award the day he and his wife returned from the hospital with newborn twins.

Exquisitely observed, Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr's varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats -- the chroniclers of Rome who came before him -- and visits the piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. He attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II and takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. He and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighborhood, whose clamor of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself.

This intimate and revelatory book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood, and a fascinating story of a writer's craft -- the process by which he transforms what he sees and experiences into sentences.

About this title

Review:

`A warm and funny account of Rome through the eyes of a young American family' -- Image Magazine

`He writes perceptively about strangeness: the tiny oddities of a foreign city, the terror of a foreign hospital...'
-- The Observer

About the Author:

Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and twin sons. He is the author of ‘The Shell Collector’ and ‘About Grace’, and is one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1416540016
• ISBN 13: 9781416540014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 210