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The Pastures of Heaven (Twentieth-Century Classics)
Binding: Paperback
Author: John Steinbeck
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Features:
Average Rating: 4.5
Total Customer Reviews: 17
List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $10.20
Sales Rank: 97138
Product Description
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: stories are interesting and show glimpses of genius The Pastures of Heaven is a collected of interrelated stories about a California valley nicknamed Pastures of Heaven. The stories are interesting and showglimpses of Steinbecks later genius but there lacks the depth of character his better works and his descriptive powers also fall short of the great works to come. It is a good early work and many novelist never reached the level of this book but I can only give it three stars especially in the context of his overall work and his talent
Product Review Summary: More than short stories, less than a novel I had never heard of Steinbeck's Pastures of Heaven before stumbling across it by accident. Since this book has never had the fame of Steinbeck's later novels - East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, etc. - it's unfamiliar to many readers. It's shouldn't be! These laconic inter-connected stories tell of the people who come to make their homes in the Salinas Valley. Some folks send out roots and live there for generations. Others move though the small town like tumbleweeds. As a whole they weave a tapestry that is at once specific to the time and place, yet universal to the American experience.
In many ways Pastures of Heaven reminds me to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. But where much of Anderson's book dealt with dreams lost, set aside or abandoned, Steinbeck puts his faith in the American spirit.
Also, for those who have read and cherished Steinbeck's later novels, let them find the seeds of later characters and themes in Pastures. Even in his early career Steinbeck was developing the prototypes of the Trasks and the Joads and others.
Product Review Summary: Enchanting cycle of stories Steinbeck was a young man and unknown writer when he wrote and first published this book, but you wouldn't know it by the beautiful prose and the moving set of stories, all taking place in Pastures of Heaven, an idilic valley in early-20th-century Monterey County, California.
This is an accessible book, populated with a diverse group of memorable characters that reflect many aspects of human nature. Also very present is Steinbeck's love for the natural world and the places in the California Central Coast where he was born and grew up alongside the simple people. But this book transcends regionalisms and it is beautiful literature that can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere, decades after its conception.
While many people would recommend to read first Steinbeck's tougher books such as "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men", I say "Pastures of Heaven", despite being a relatively obscure book in his career, would serve as a fine introduction to his art, particularly if the reader is not looking for the strong social themes of his best-known works. On the same vein, "The Long Valley", published years later and depicting a more mature writing style, is another terrific series of short-stories taking place in the same world of Salinas Valley/Monterey ("Steinbeck Country").
Product Review Summary: lovely but misunderstood Steinbeck's book comes with this comment on the back cover: "Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity precipitate disasters and tragedies." This opinion, which the author of the Introduction seems to endorse, strikes me as a very surface take on the deeper significance of these stories.
The Munroes do show up in all of them; but when they do, a bubble of fantasy is punctured. They are the Nemesis principle, the breath of reality, among people lost in delusions and deceptions. Because of it, a man nicknamed Shark loses his social mask and finds his backbone, a father is forced to give up custody of his wild son, another father realizes the wrongness of raising his son in isolated poverty, a woman lets go of the insane daughter she's emotionally dependent on and stands up for her own life, two sisters face a crucial choice about their future, a daughter is given the chance to face her long-lost father...
These are not tragedies so much as consequences that puncture the psychic insulation of people living in a kind of Californian Eden. Their stories are not Steinbeck's finest, but they reflect the lucid writing and psychological acumen that characterize his later work.
Product Review Summary: Fascinating stories about people and their problems More a book of short stories than a real novel, The Pastures of Heaven is one of my favorite of Johnny Steinbeck's. The book consists of ten stories centered around the very different and very realistic groups of people living in the California valley. Bittersweet is a good way to describe most of the stories as most seem to end tragically and hit where it hurts.
Steinbeck, as always, tells the stories as a passive observer with a great eye for detail and leaves it to us to form our own opinions on the characters and events. Each story will have you debating the characters' motives and actions. Easy to read and hard to put down.
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