Book Box Choice 2
₹1,499.00 ₹
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Books included in Book Box 2 are:
– The Door by Magda Szabó
– James by Percival Everett
Please read on, for more details on the Books & Authors
- Description
Our Book Boxes will help you discover the greatest literature from around the world. Get a diverse and captivating reading experience with our book subscription boxes
- how it works
- This is a bimonthly subscription (shipped every two months)
- Each Box will include 1 fixed book (chosen by us), 1 book of your choice, and a Bookish Gift – something special and delightful.
- This is a bid to encourage you to purchase books from book lovers instead of from soulless conglomerates.
- About the Books
The Door By Magda Szabó
The writer Claire Messud, in a review in The New York Times, says about Magda Szabó's The Door:
"...I’ve been haunted by this novel. Szabo’s lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life."For our first ever Book Box in India, the fixed book had to be a lot of things; it would be the Indian reader's introduction to Boxwalla, after all. Hungarian writer Magda Szabó's The Door is everything. Szabó is one of our favorite writers ever, and if this is your first time reading her work, we're thrilled to introduce you to a writer who can change how you think about literature, or as Messud above, even alter the way you understand your own life.
The Door is the story of two women: the first is a writer, a fictionalized version of Szabó, and the other her housekeeper, Emerence. Emerence remains a mystery for much of the book, though the narrator tries her best to discover her secrets. She has a formidable reputation as a housekeeper, and even at her old age, her strength is tremendous. Animals love her and people rely on her, even if they may be a bit afraid of her.
The novel is dominated by the author's interest in her housekeeper. Over twenty years, the women's relationship grows, ruptures, and deepens. But as the narrator achieves success as a writer and Emerence's secrets are revealed, the fault lines that emerge in their relationship could be devastating.
First published in 1987, this edition is a fresh, prizewinning translation by Len Rix.
James by Percival Everett
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. We introduced his writing in our US Book Box in August 2020 with Erasure, a satire about racial stereotypes in the publishing industry, which he wrote with his pet crow Jim Crow on his shoulder. We’ve been delighted to see Everett’s works garner popular attention recently, especially with the movie American Fiction, which won the 2024 Oscar for Best Adapter Screenplay.
In James, Everett’s famous humour and sense of irony is ever-present. What sets this novel apart, however, is the sincerity and tenderness of the narrative. The story is told from the perspective of James, or Jim, the “runaway” slave who was Huckleberry Finn’s travel companion on the Mississippi River. This is Everett at his peak, more personal and heartbreaking than ever.
In James, Percival Everett gives a voice to Jim, the enslaved runaway who accompanies the titular character through his travels in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humuor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “cult literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature. - About the Authors: Magda Szabó and Percival Everett
Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born in Debrecen, north-eastern Hungary. She was raised in a devout Protestant and intellectual family. After graduating from the University of Debrecen as a teacher of Latin and of Hungarian, she worked as a teacher and in the Ministry of Religion and Education. Szabó began her writing career as a poet, during which time she came in contact with the New Moon Group who defined poetry of that generation in Hungary. Her second collection, Back to the Human, was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary's most prestigious literary awards. However, the award was taken away the same day as Szabó was declared an enemy of the people by the recently installed communist party. She was fired from the Ministry the same year. Banned from publishing, Szabó turned to fiction, defying the guidelines of Social Realism laid down by the State and writing about what she referred to as “terrible women”.
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.