Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a novel inspired by the friendship between famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley-"surely among the best books Oscar ever wrote" (Paul Auster).

Acclaimed novelist Oscar Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author's works. Ingeniously blending correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long-vanished world, the novel superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures, from their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other's writing, mutual hatred of slavery, social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the time, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley's adoptive father.

A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos's gifts, as well as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.

Includes a reading group guide.
1121384542
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a novel inspired by the friendship between famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley-"surely among the best books Oscar ever wrote" (Paul Auster).

Acclaimed novelist Oscar Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author's works. Ingeniously blending correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long-vanished world, the novel superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures, from their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other's writing, mutual hatred of slavery, social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the time, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley's adoptive father.

A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos's gifts, as well as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.

Includes a reading group guide.
38.99 In Stock
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Unabridged — 18 hours, 13 minutes

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Unabridged — 18 hours, 13 minutes

Audiobook (Digital)

$38.99
(Not eligible for purchase using B&N Audiobooks Subscription credits)

Listen on the free Barnes & Noble NOOK app


Related collections and offers


Overview

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a novel inspired by the friendship between famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley-"surely among the best books Oscar ever wrote" (Paul Auster).

Acclaimed novelist Oscar Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author's works. Ingeniously blending correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long-vanished world, the novel superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures, from their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other's writing, mutual hatred of slavery, social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the time, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley's adoptive father.

A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos's gifts, as well as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.

Includes a reading group guide.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Oscar Hijuelos, who left us suddenly and far too soon, has been deeply missed by those of us who were his friends-missed both as a friend and as a writer. The friend will not be coming back, but what a miracle that he has given us this last novel-which is a fine and wonderful novel, and surely among the best books Oscar ever wrote."—Paul Auster

"The great Oscar Hijuelos lives on in this ambitious, fascinating, and richly detailed work that, like the author, is in a class by itself."—Gay Talese

"TWAIN & STANLEY ENTER PARADISE is a natural and delightful extension of Hijuelos' work, and like his earlier books, this one is distinguished by vitality so intense as to give the reader a charge just picking up the book. . . . a voice that is haunting and mesmerizing, and a story that shows just how fantastic and enjoyable Oscar Hijuelos' imagination really was."—Craig Nova, author of The Good Son

"What a wonder to have Oscar Hijuelos return from the celestial beyond with a tale that is thoroughly of this world and firmly anchored in history! TWAIN & STANLEY ENTER PARADISE is a marvelous blend of research and the imagination, resurrecting two fascinating contemporaries-Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley-and lending a bygone era the shimmer of here and now."—Marie Arana, author of American Chica, Cellophane, and Bolívar: American Liberator.

"An extraordinary feat of imaginative historical re-creation."—Booklist (starred review)

"This book is good news for Hijuelos fans."—Kirkus

"Vividly imagined and detailed epic...How lucky we are to have this rich novel."—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"The final masterpiece by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer....Twain fans, get ready."—Huffington Post

"A magical story."—David Baldacci, CBS Sunday Morning

"So sad that this is our last Hijuelos novel, so fabulous that we have it."—Library Journal (starred review)

"A brilliant posthumous capstone."—EW.com

OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile

This mostly epistolary novel tracks the real and imagined friendship of Samuel Clemens (author Mark Twain) and Henry Morton Stanley (African explorer) from their meeting on a Mississippi riverboat before the Civil War through the end of their lives. Clemens, Stanley, and Stanley’s wife— painter Dorothy Tennant—are the main voices, ably performed by the ensemble of narrators. Henry Leyva captures the charming and tragic elder Clemens, and—more remarkably—James Langton, the bull-headed and searching Stanley. The vividly rendered Tennant—read by Polly Lee—matches both for energy and passion. Robert Petkoff ably covers the narration and other major characters. A meditation on Anglo-American imperial culture in the late nineteenth century, the story meanders from Cuba to the Congo. F.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2015-08-03
Posthumous publication of an ambitious, atypical historical novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. When Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989, etc.) died of a heart attack in the fall of 2013, he had been working for more than a dozen years on this 19th-century epic concerning the unlikely but close friendship of two of the most famous men in America. They had met working on a riverboat, a couple of aspiring writers, well before one would travel to Africa in search of Dr. Livingstone and the other would become a beloved humorist under the pen name of Mark Twain. Since Hijuelos has long been known for voluptuary narratives of Cuba and Cuban America, filled with song and sex, the Victorian primness of the various tones he employs here stands in stark contrast (though a trip to Cuba proves pivotal). The novel encompasses long stretches of unpublished manuscripts purportedly written by Stanley and his wife, as well as extended correspondence between each of them and Twain. Stanley had been an orphan taken under the wing of a benefactor (whose surname the young man took), and there's a sense throughout that the way Stanley portrays his life is not the way it actually transpired. With Stanley's health and that of Twain's wife in parallel decline, there's a hint of romantic triangle, what Dorothy Stanley calls "some kind of autumnal infatuation," though history left that attraction unrequited, as she remarried shortly after her husband's death. The meditations on time and death in the book's last third are particularly poignant given the author's own untimely passing, but the whole of the novel is unwieldy, with awkward dialogue ("I am wondering what you can tell me about yourself") and juxtapositions (a section titled "Clemens in That Time" follows Lady Stanley's extended account of her husband's death). An Afterword by Hijuelos' widow explains that he was working on the novel up to his death, having written "thousands of pages that he attempted to winnow down to publishable size, even as he continued to expand upon the story." This book is good news for Hijuelos fans, but considering its flaws, it's tantalizing to think of what it would have been like if the author had managed to finish it himself.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940170292516
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Publication date: 11/03/2015
Edition description: Unabridged
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews