Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent
Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was
educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing
director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in
his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written
while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and
during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service.
Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living,
Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting,
and a memoir, Pack My Bag.
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short
stories and a play, Pastorale. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea
Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan
Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. The Collected
Stories of Deborah Eisenberg won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award and in
2015 she was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the
Short Story. She lives in New York City.
“Henry Green is nearer than almost any other to the spirit and what
one might call the central nerve of our time.” —Elizabeth
Bowen
“Green questions what it could mean to come ‘back’ from a war that
hasn’t ended in reality or memory. In this quick and engrossing
novel, Green reveals that living and loving are more about
embracing failures and making frequent recalibrations than striving
toward unattainable ideals.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“To describe his scenes as having the visual clarity of the best
movie shots does not convey their peculiar quality of
hallucination. To say that his plots are hinged on certain fatal
situations from myth and fable does not carry over Green’s feeling
for our particular fate in modern life, or the compulsive fears and
anxieties of his characters for their modern fate, especially for
organizations represented by initials.” —Mark
Schorer, The New York Times Book Review
“Back is Henry Green’s most extended attempt to plumb the
world of the hunted—and haunted.” —Jeremy Treglown
"Writing that shines with wit and good humor." —Time
The skillful coupling of love talk and office terminology, the
dexterous handling of characters who seem at first glance to be
picked bone clean but who turn into cream, and the view of a world
just a little off center make Back a delightful, wispy and original
experience.
—Kirkus
In all of these novels we are made aware of the most profound and
surprising truths about life, love and the human heart without
being able to pinpoint any one page, line, or moment of epiphany.
To read all three back-to-back is to find oneself in the presence
of rare genius, fit to sit along Woolf, Fitzgerald and Joyce on
anyone’s shelf of classics. Henry Green is here to stay.
—David Wright, The Seattle Times
A spare and eventually incredibly moving story of hope lost and
regained, and of scars that never fully heal.
—John Williams, “The Book Reader,” NY1
"The skillful coupling of love talk and office terminology, the
dexterous handling of characters who seem at first glance to be
picked bone clean but who turn into cream, and the view of a world
just a little off center make Back a delightful, wispy
and original experience." —Kirkus
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
