{"product_id":"boston-adventure-isbn-9781681375373","title":"Boston Adventure","description":"\u003cb\u003eA provocative story of class struggle, privilege, and poverty that put American author Jean Stafford on the map.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGrowing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel, she keeps company with the austere and fascinating Miss Pride. Years pass, and Sonie—now the caretaker of her fragile mother—receives an invitation from Miss Pride to move to Beacon Hill and be her personal secretary. Salvation, she thinks, is at hand. In Boston, Sonie does come to know a new and broader world, one in which she mingles with both blue bloods and louche European refugees, and yet her troubles, she discovers, are hardly over.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBoston Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e was published when Jean Stafford was twenty-nine, and it was an immediate best seller. Combining Dickensian color and Proustian insight in its depiction of an isolated but determined young woman, it looks forward to Stafford’s celebrated novel \u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e as well as to the short stories for which she would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.“Forty years after [Stafford’s] death, her sentences still gleam like knives. . . . In Stafford, there is the kingdom of childhood in all its taboos—its furtiveness and griminess. . . . Here is the fury of children. . . . Here is the full range of their dark knowledge.” —Parul Seghal, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Boston Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e, Stafford’s debut, is like Charlotte Brontë’s \u003ci\u003eVillette\u003c\/i\u003e, a raw depiction of female isolation.” —Maureen Corrigan, \u003ci\u003eFresh Air\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stafford is not interested in flattering our sensibilities. . . . She has a remarkable ability to balance lacerating irony with a very plangent pathos.” —Garth Greenwell\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Boston Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e stands as a textbook example of formal dexterity and invention. . . . Sentence for sentence, \u003ci\u003eBoston Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e is as beautifully composed as any American novel I have ever read.” —Scott Bradfield, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stafford . . . studiously recreates a certain idea of literary Boston, replete with the flavour of Henry James and William Dean Howells.” —Dennis Zhou, \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Stafford\u003c\/b\u003e (1915–1979) was a novelist and short-story writer. She published the novels \u003ci\u003eBoston Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Mountain Lion\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Catherine Wheel\u003c\/i\u003e; more than forty short stories; and \u003ci\u003eA Mother in History\u003c\/i\u003e, a journalistic portrait of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her \u003ci\u003eCollected Stories\u003c\/i\u003e won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRumaan Alam\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the novels \u003ci\u003eRich and Pretty\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThat Kind of Mother\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eLeave the World Behind\u003c\/i\u003e. His writing has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301118922981,"sku":"NP9781681375373","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681375373.jpg?v=1767722975","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/boston-adventure-isbn-9781681375373","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}