{"product_id":"the-mountain-lion-isbn-9781590173527","title":"The Mountain Lion","description":"\u003cp\u003eEight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more  fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.\u003c\/p\u003e\"Stafford's unusual, intense novel about a brother and sister who spend a fateful summer on their uncle's ranch in Colorado has never been forgotten by anyone who's read it since its publication in 1947. This handsome new paperback edition from New York Review Books includes Stafford's 1971 author's note and an afterword by Kathryn Davis.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stafford is one of the 20th century’s most undervalued writers...in masterful short stories and especially her second and greatest novel, she managed an American miracle: combining Jamesian psychological depth and style—at once lapidary and viscous, like see-through molasses—with Mark Twain’s backwoods wildness and humor.” —Garth Greenwell,\u003ci\u003e The Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e The Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"How could it be that Jean Stafford has vanished from view, remembered more for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling than her considerable accomplishments as a writer? Her 1970 Pulitzer Prize for \"Collected Stories\" was apparently no inoculation from the vagaries of literary fashion, and perhaps after languishing in out-of-print no man's land, this edition of \"The Mountain Lion\" will win Stafford new legions of readers. The novel, which appeared in 1947, is in many ways a coming-of-age story, centering on a precocious brother and sister who spend their summers at their uncle's Colorado ranch. Sounds simple enough, but Stafford's world is eerie and chilling -- though emotionally red hot, as boy and girl chafe against their suburban, silk-and-sherry life and yet find the freedom of the frontier, and the prospect of adulthood, almost impossible to bear.\" —Elizabeth Taylor, \u003ci\u003eThe Chicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Stafford has a dry desert style — you feel the stillness and the heat in her writing, the swish of palm trees, voices of children, the sounds of sweeping beneath walnut trees, the whir of hummingbirds...Stafford can write a real nightmare, the kind in which everything looks ominous, words cause permanent scars and a character's one shot at happiness is dashed by his very own hands.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If not the best novel of the 1940s, \u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion \u003c\/i\u003eis a very fine book indeed, a classic of childhood rage and bewilderment told in a superbly controlled colloquial prose.\" —Elaine Showalter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A mature and wise novel, a novel so utterly different from her first that it is  evident she need never imitate herself, as young novelists too often do after an  early success. Written with simplicity and often with astonishing power…\u003ci\u003eThe Mountain  Lion\u003c\/i\u003e is likely to beguile many a reader into thinking that he has hold of merely  a shrewdly perspective and amusing novel of children, when what he really has in  his hand is a charge of psychological dynamite.” —Joseph Henry Jackson, \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco  Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eLike Flaubert and Eudora Welty, Miss Stafford is a master of making the  objects in a room exhibit a dumb and eloquent presence…\u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion \u003c\/i\u003eis one of  the best novels about adolescence in American literature.” —Guy Davenport, \u003ci\u003eThe New  York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It's a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind  in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” —Jonathan Yardley,\u003ci\u003e The Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A subtly and brilliantly realized tragedy of adolescence” —Joyce  Carol Oates,\u003ci\u003e The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA “wonderful record of childhood and  adolescence…I do not know where to turn in contemporary fiction for a more wonderful  recording of the sights and smells, the emotions and values, the hates and passions  of childhood and youth…[a] beautifully modeled tale.” —Howard Mumford Jones\u003ci\u003e, The  New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“a delicate, sharp story of childhood and adolescence.\u003ci\u003e” —Time \u003c\/i\u003emagazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e has all the form, design and sever selectivity of a controlled  and conscious work of art. Its characters are painfully real, interesting as individuals  and significant as representatives of various attitudes toward life.” —Orville Prescott,  \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“The Mountain Lion \u003c\/i\u003eremains a brilliant achievement, an exploration  of adolescence to set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork \u003ci\u003eThe Member of the Wedding\u003c\/i\u003e.” —Joyce Carol Oates, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“The Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e is so good  in part because, along with splendid writing, it is filled with American lore-games,  songs and slang-and animated by the insatiable demands of its young heroine, Molly  Fawcett, as fiercely intelligent and impossible a person as was her creator.” —William  H. Pritchard, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A psychological thriller about two  adolescents, a brother and sister, and of a hunt which has tragic results for them  both.” —William Murphy,\u003ci\u003e The Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It's riches are many-in language,  in irony, in insights into life's ambiguities.” —Paperbacks New and Noteworthy,\u003ci\u003e The  New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“approaches the stature of a modern classic.\u003ci\u003e” —The New York Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The author manages to convey the sense of dark and rushing wings-darker for the  bright blue sky-which plunges the end of the book into unexpected horror.\u003ci\u003e” —New York  Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For the brutality and correctness of its ending, I think only  Cormac McCarthy's\u003ci\u003e Blood Meridian\u003c\/i\u003e competes with \u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e…among American literary  children, Ralph and Molly have peers only in Holden Caulfield, Scout and Jem Finch,  and Huckleberry Finn.” —\u003ci\u003eTin House\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the work of perhaps no other comparably youthful  author has there been recent evidence of equal insight and compassion.” —Jean Lehman\u003ci\u003e,  The Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Miss Stafford is, fundamentally, out for much bigger  game than a mere couple of troubled kids. It is life itself-the painful state of  being human and conscious-that Miss Stafford's penetrating little story examines  and vilifies. For what Molly and Ralph suffer in exaggerated form and almost unremittingly  in the pages of\u003ci\u003e The Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e is but the malaise which from time to time torments  us all-that recurrent sense of pain and apprehension which is a function, or at any  rate an inevitable by-product, of the state of consciousness itself.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Herald  Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jean Stafford writes with the relentless and dazzling brilliance of an  avenging angel wielding a white-hot sword. She has a sound feeling for and great  appreciation of the simple ways of simple people.” —Florence Haxton Bullock,\u003ci\u003e The  New York Hearld Tribune Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Hard to match for subtlety and understanding…A  sharply focused study rather than a broad exploration of adolescence, \u003c\/i\u003ewritten wittily,  lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language.”\u003ci\u003e —The New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA “positive artistic creation…a fine book.”\u003ci\u003e —Newark News\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“written with sharp-edged  humor and compassionate understanding.”\u003ci\u003e —The Washington Star\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“\u003c\/i\u003eMiss Stafford writes  with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements  are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending  afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of  evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible.”\u003ci\u003e —Saturday Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Miss Stafford holds the reader spellbound throughout the narrative. She creates  an intense atmosphere with a few simple phrases and characterizes her figures in  a masterly manner through the eyes of the children.\u003ci\u003e” —Catholic World\u003c\/i\u003eJean Stafford (1915–1979) was born in Covina, California, the\u003cbr\u003eyoungest of four children. When she was five her father, an unsuccessful\u003cbr\u003ewriter of Westerns, lost the bulk of his inherited fortune on the\u003cbr\u003estock exchange. The impoverished family, forced to move, eventually\u003cbr\u003eresettled in Boulder, Colorado. Stafford excelled as a student, earning\u003cbr\u003eboth a B.A. and an M.A. in four years on a scholarship at the University\u003cbr\u003eof Colorado, but her college years were marked by poverty as well as\u003cbr\u003eby the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford’s\u003cbr\u003epresence. A fellowship from the University of Heidelberg enabled\u003cbr\u003eStafford to study philology abroad following her graduation. Shortly\u003cbr\u003eafter her return she met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in\u003cbr\u003eNew York City in 1940. In 1944 she published her first book, \u003ci\u003eBoston\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAdventure\u003c\/i\u003e, a best selling novel of manners, and her second and most\u003cbr\u003ehighly acclaimed novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e, followed in 1947—years\u003cbr\u003ewhich also brought the collapse of her marriage to Lowell and a stay\u003cbr\u003ein a psychiatric hospital. Stafford began to write short stories, and by\u003cbr\u003e1948, the year in which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, her\u003cbr\u003ework was regularly appearing in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1952 Stafford\u003cbr\u003epublished a third novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Catherine Wheel\u003c\/i\u003e, and in 1970 she was\u003cbr\u003eawarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her \u003ci\u003eCollected Stories\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003eStafford was married twice more—to \u003ci\u003eLife \u003c\/i\u003eeditor Oliver Jensen and to\u003cbr\u003ethe writer A. J. Liebling—but lived out her last fifteen years alone.\u003cbr\u003eShe suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White\u003cbr\u003ePlains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKathryn Davis is the author of many novels, including \u003ci\u003eLabrador\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Girl Who Trod on a Loaf\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHell\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Walking Tour\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Thin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePlace\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eVersailles\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship\u003cbr\u003eand the 2006 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She teaches at\u003cbr\u003eWashington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303377293541,"sku":"NP9781590173527","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590173527.jpg?v=1767740587","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-mountain-lion-isbn-9781590173527","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}