Donna Tartt
Autor(a) de The Secret History
About the Author
Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi on December 23, 1963. She wrote her first novel while attending Bennington College, where she graduated in 1986. The novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. Her other works include The Little Friend, which won the WH Smith Literary Award in mostrar mais 2003, and The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Best Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for Fiction. In 2014, Time named Tartt among their 100 Most Influential People. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Obras por Donna Tartt
Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine 21 exemplares
The Ambush 14 exemplares
Tam-O'-Shanter 5 exemplares
GARDALINA 2 exemplares
1995 1 exemplar
The Gospel According to Larry 1 exemplar
ההיסטוריה הסודית 1 exemplar
This Much I Know 1 exemplar
Le Petit Copain by Donna Tartt (2004-10-25) 1 exemplar
Associated Works
Best of The Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing {anthology} (2002) — Contribuidor — 42 exemplares
A Very Southern Christmas: Holiday Stories from the South’s Best Writers (2003) — Contribuidor — 33 exemplares
Summer Tides: A Collection of Short Stories 1 exemplar
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome canónico
- Tartt, Donna
- Nome legal
- Tartt, Donna Louise
- Outros nomes
- Tartt, Donna Louise (birth name)
- Data de nascimento
- 1963-12-23
- Sexo
- female
- Nacionalidade
- Amerika
- Local de nascimento
- Greenwood, Mississippi, Amerika
- Locais de residência
- Grenada, Mississippi, Amerika
- Educação
- Bennington College, Vermont, Amerika
- Ocupações
- auteur
- Prémios e menções honrosas
- WH Smith Literary Award 2003
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425- Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American author. Tartt's novels include The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.
Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi located in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her father, Don Tartt, was a successful local politician, while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary. At age thirteen, Tartt was published for the first time when a sonnet was included in a Mississippi literary review.
Tartt enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary," said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star."
Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982. At Bennington, Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks.
In 2002, Tartt was reportedly working on a retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of novellas in which ancient myths are reimagined and rewritten by contemporary authors. In 2006, Tartt's short story "The Ambush" was included in the Best American Short Stories 2006.
Tartt is a convert to Catholicism and contributed an essay, "The spirit and writing in a secular world", to The Novel, Spirituality and Modern Culture (2000). In her essay Tartt wrote that "...faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it". However, Tartt also warned of the danger of writers who impose their beliefs or convictions on their novels. She wrote that writers should "shy from asserting those convictions directly in their work".
Membros
Discussions
Thriller - group of friends killed their friend em Name that Book (Outubro 2020)
The Goldfinch SPOILERS ALLOWED em Girlybooks (Agosto 2014)
Críticas
I was introduced to Donna Tartt when The Goldfinch was published. That book continues to be one of my all-time favorites. Ever since, people have been recommending I read The Secret History. I finally followed the advice and put The Secret History on hold with my local library. Approximately six months later, my hold finally came in for the audiobook on the Libby app.
The Secret History is an incredible story. I didn’t know much about the plot when I started reading, which I think best suited my experience. My personal challenge while reading The Secret History is that I kept comparing it to how much I loved The Goldfinch, and The Secret History didn’t quite rise to that level for me. I repeatedly reminded myself to manage my expectations and stop comparing one to the other. When I was able to do that, I became immersed in the story.
The story is told from the perspective of Richard Papen, a young man who leaves his home in California to attend Hampden College in Vermont. New to the area with no friends or acquaintances, Richard enrolls in the Ancient Greek program and is academically counseled by professor Julian Morrow. There are only five other students in his Greek studies class. Richard successfully makes a good impression on his peers and is cautiously brought into their close knit fold. Richard never truly seems to fit in with this group as they come from money and don’t really need an education for a future career. Richard comes from a differently world entirely.
The Secret History opens with Richard telling his story from a much later time in his life. He immediately reveals that one member of his peer group is dead. Richard then shares the development of their relationships and how one of his friends met his fate. The story continues to grow darker and more dysfunctional by the minute. It’s a very tragic novel that is exceptionally written.
As I previously mentioned, I borrowed the audiobook from my local library with the Libby app. Surprisingly, Donna Tartt narrates the audiobook and she does an excellent job. It was an additional pleasure to hear the book exactly as the author wrote the story.
I have photos and additional information that I'm unable to include here. It can all be found on my blog, in the link below.
A Book And A Dog… (mais)
The Secret History is an incredible story. I didn’t know much about the plot when I started reading, which I think best suited my experience. My personal challenge while reading The Secret History is that I kept comparing it to how much I loved The Goldfinch, and The Secret History didn’t quite rise to that level for me. I repeatedly reminded myself to manage my expectations and stop comparing one to the other. When I was able to do that, I became immersed in the story.
The story is told from the perspective of Richard Papen, a young man who leaves his home in California to attend Hampden College in Vermont. New to the area with no friends or acquaintances, Richard enrolls in the Ancient Greek program and is academically counseled by professor Julian Morrow. There are only five other students in his Greek studies class. Richard successfully makes a good impression on his peers and is cautiously brought into their close knit fold. Richard never truly seems to fit in with this group as they come from money and don’t really need an education for a future career. Richard comes from a differently world entirely.
The Secret History opens with Richard telling his story from a much later time in his life. He immediately reveals that one member of his peer group is dead. Richard then shares the development of their relationships and how one of his friends met his fate. The story continues to grow darker and more dysfunctional by the minute. It’s a very tragic novel that is exceptionally written.
As I previously mentioned, I borrowed the audiobook from my local library with the Libby app. Surprisingly, Donna Tartt narrates the audiobook and she does an excellent job. It was an additional pleasure to hear the book exactly as the author wrote the story.
I have photos and additional information that I'm unable to include here. It can all be found on my blog, in the link below.
A Book And A Dog… (mais)
The blurb for this book makes it sound like a murder mystery, but it's far from that. Instead, it's a study of a family pulled apart by the death - and it seems, murder - of a bright and energetic son, Robin, at 9 years old, which occurs at the very start of the book. After that, we pick up the story 12 years later with his youngest sister, Harriet, who is the main character.
I loved Harriet although I found her very reminiscent of the protagonist in the children's book, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, and there are parallels between the two, for example, the way she is reared by the housekeeper and devastated when the latter leaves. However, this is a more developed character, and she doesn't spy on people out of sheer nosiness. Instead, this Harriet forms an obsession with who killed Robin, and embarks on a singleminded quest to dish out retribution to the person concerned. The finger is pointed by the housekeeper, Ida, whom Harriet loves and uncritically believes, and she sets out to 'get' Danny Ratliff, who already has a criminal record at the age of 20 and who was in Robin's class at school. The Ratliff family are a crime wave in themselves, and Ida holds a grudge from when they burned down a church, killing an old lady and causing her and others to suffer burns.
The book is a rather rambling tale: it consists of over 500 pages of small print. Much of it is beautifully written and observed, with believable everyday life in a small town, the interactions of family and how people often get on each others' nerves, and lots of minor quirky characters. Contrasts are made between Harriet's own more privileged family, though they have fallen from their former grandeur, and the black women who work in their houses for low pay, and the 'white trash' Ratliffs, who live in an American Gothic setting which borders on the surreal. Danny Ratliff and his brothers live in trailers with their decrepit grandmother who trades on her various illnesses, and passes on her own pernicious views of how poor people like themselves are victimised, while disdaining the education that might help her grandsons escape their deadend existence. Her favourite, Danny's elder brother, is a psychotic who has taken on these attitudes as well as inheriting their deceased father's violent streak. These tendencies are worsened by his liberal sampling of the metamphetamine he manufactures. Danny also is hooked and becomes increasingly strung out, partly through his inability to sleep due to the drug.
The Ratliffs' sense of persecution spirals as Harriet and her friend Hely become interested in what they are doing in the upstairs apartment which another of the brothers, who 'got' religion in jail, is renting. A guest preacher from out of town is staying: part of his ministry involves snakehandling, and he brings several boxes of snakes, which must be hidden from the landlord. The set piece where the two children break into the apartment is a tour de force. In fact, snakes figure largely in this story: I had no idea before that there were so many poisonous kinds in the USA. Unfortunately for Harriet, the brothers search for her afterwards, and she is drawn increasingly into danger. This suspenseful subplot contrasts with the languid life of Harriet's mother Charlotte - who has never recovered from Robin's death and spends most of the time lying around in bed, spaced out on tranquilisers - and her older sister Allison who lives a kind of dream existence. Harriet takes after her no-nonsense grandmother Edie, another character I liked, and finds it impossible to confide in her family. She only has Hely to turn to and when he is drawn away into school activities, he inadvertantly abandons her to the mercies of the Ratliff family.
A lot of the book is in the style of 'slice of life', giving the flavour of life in a southern American town in what appears to be the 1970s from the various clues and references made. A lot of things are brought in and appear to be significant, but are then dropped - Robin's blackbird costume, a hat once found by an aunt on her bed when no one apparently could have entered the house, Allison's amnesia about what happened to Robin although she was out in the garden and was found crying, so it seems she was a witness. This would probably frustrate a lot of readers, but I found I could go with the flow - this isn't really a crime story despite the criminals, and the crime - if it was that and not a freak accident which happened to a little boy who liked playing Batman - is significant more for the way it has wrenched family life out of a precarious normality, and the impact it has had on the forming of Harriet's character. Only the very ending caught me out a bit when it veered off to a conversation between Hely and his older brother, but I think it is meant to point us to who 'dunnit'.The scene just before it, where Harriet's father mentions 'Robin's little friend, Danny' (presumably Danny is the 'little friend' of the title, which explains why so much of the book focuses on his viewpoint), leading to Harriet's horrified realisation that she might have been wrong all along, might also act as a reminder, when we read the final scene, that Hely's brother was also in Robin's class and therefore could have been a visitor to the house. .
Ultimately the book is realistic enough that we never find out for sure who was responsible and whether it was murder or a childhood game gone wrong - as so often in real life. The book almost earned a 5-star rating, but is more of a 4.5 because there are a lot of bits which weren't really necessary even to the 'slice of life' aspect, and the Ratliff circus becomes a little too surreal to be believed at times.… (mais)
I loved Harriet although I found her very reminiscent of the protagonist in the children's book, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, and there are parallels between the two, for example, the way she is reared by the housekeeper and devastated when the latter leaves. However, this is a more developed character, and she doesn't spy on people out of sheer nosiness. Instead, this Harriet forms an obsession with who killed Robin, and embarks on a singleminded quest to dish out retribution to the person concerned. The finger is pointed by the housekeeper, Ida, whom Harriet loves and uncritically believes, and she sets out to 'get' Danny Ratliff, who already has a criminal record at the age of 20 and who was in Robin's class at school. The Ratliff family are a crime wave in themselves, and Ida holds a grudge from when they burned down a church, killing an old lady and causing her and others to suffer burns.
The book is a rather rambling tale: it consists of over 500 pages of small print. Much of it is beautifully written and observed, with believable everyday life in a small town, the interactions of family and how people often get on each others' nerves, and lots of minor quirky characters. Contrasts are made between Harriet's own more privileged family, though they have fallen from their former grandeur, and the black women who work in their houses for low pay, and the 'white trash' Ratliffs, who live in an American Gothic setting which borders on the surreal. Danny Ratliff and his brothers live in trailers with their decrepit grandmother who trades on her various illnesses, and passes on her own pernicious views of how poor people like themselves are victimised, while disdaining the education that might help her grandsons escape their deadend existence. Her favourite, Danny's elder brother, is a psychotic who has taken on these attitudes as well as inheriting their deceased father's violent streak. These tendencies are worsened by his liberal sampling of the metamphetamine he manufactures. Danny also is hooked and becomes increasingly strung out, partly through his inability to sleep due to the drug.
The Ratliffs' sense of persecution spirals as Harriet and her friend Hely become interested in what they are doing in the upstairs apartment which another of the brothers, who 'got' religion in jail, is renting. A guest preacher from out of town is staying: part of his ministry involves snakehandling, and he brings several boxes of snakes, which must be hidden from the landlord. The set piece where the two children break into the apartment is a tour de force. In fact, snakes figure largely in this story: I had no idea before that there were so many poisonous kinds in the USA. Unfortunately for Harriet, the brothers search for her afterwards, and she is drawn increasingly into danger. This suspenseful subplot contrasts with the languid life of Harriet's mother Charlotte - who has never recovered from Robin's death and spends most of the time lying around in bed, spaced out on tranquilisers - and her older sister Allison who lives a kind of dream existence. Harriet takes after her no-nonsense grandmother Edie, another character I liked, and finds it impossible to confide in her family. She only has Hely to turn to and when he is drawn away into school activities, he inadvertantly abandons her to the mercies of the Ratliff family.
A lot of the book is in the style of 'slice of life', giving the flavour of life in a southern American town in what appears to be the 1970s from the various clues and references made. A lot of things are brought in and appear to be significant, but are then dropped - Robin's blackbird costume, a hat once found by an aunt on her bed when no one apparently could have entered the house, Allison's amnesia about what happened to Robin although she was out in the garden and was found crying, so it seems she was a witness. This would probably frustrate a lot of readers, but I found I could go with the flow - this isn't really a crime story despite the criminals, and the crime - if it was that and not a freak accident which happened to a little boy who liked playing Batman - is significant more for the way it has wrenched family life out of a precarious normality, and the impact it has had on the forming of Harriet's character. Only the very ending caught me out a bit when it veered off to a conversation between Hely and his older brother, but I think it is meant to point us to who 'dunnit'.
Ultimately the book is realistic enough that we never find out for sure who was responsible and whether it was murder or a childhood game gone wrong - as so often in real life. The book almost earned a 5-star rating, but is more of a 4.5 because there are a lot of bits which weren't really necessary even to the 'slice of life' aspect, and the Ratliff circus becomes a little too surreal to be believed at times.… (mais)
The Goldfinch - A Masterpiece That Transfixed Me From Start to Finish
After years of anticipation, I can confidently say that The Goldfinch exceeded all of the hype surrounding Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This intricate, sprawling story hooked me from the opening pages and didn't let go until well after I'd finished.
Theo Decker is an fully realized, complex protagonist that stuck with me long after turning the final page. From his turbulent childhood to struggle with addiction and loss as an adult, his journey is powerfully compelling. Tartt imbues Theo with an intimately human flawed nature that kept me sympathizing with him through countless poor choices.
What really stands out is how meticulously Tartt constructs this vast narrative. Shifting between various time periods and locations, I was never less lost in the intricacies. Her beautiful prose brought each setting vibrantly to life, from the frigid streets of Amsterdam to the buzzing art community of New York City.
At its heart, The Goldfinch is ultimately a moving meditation on grief, fate, and the power of art to both heal and haunt us. The titular painting is the vivid thread connecting all of the storylines in an emotional, thought-provoking way. I found myself constantly contemplating the symbolism behind this seemingly simple work.
Without a doubt, this is Tartt at the height of her talents as a storyteller. She juggles an immense cast of characters and complex plot points effortlessly. Even hundreds of pages in, I never once skimmed - I was fully transported by this endlessly absorbing read from start to finish. The Goldfinch is a true modern masterpiece that has remained etched in my memory since. I know I'll be revisiting this one many times to come.… (mais)
After years of anticipation, I can confidently say that The Goldfinch exceeded all of the hype surrounding Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This intricate, sprawling story hooked me from the opening pages and didn't let go until well after I'd finished.
Theo Decker is an fully realized, complex protagonist that stuck with me long after turning the final page. From his turbulent childhood to struggle with addiction and loss as an adult, his journey is powerfully compelling. Tartt imbues Theo with an intimately human flawed nature that kept me sympathizing with him through countless poor choices.
What really stands out is how meticulously Tartt constructs this vast narrative. Shifting between various time periods and locations, I was never less lost in the intricacies. Her beautiful prose brought each setting vibrantly to life, from the frigid streets of Amsterdam to the buzzing art community of New York City.
At its heart, The Goldfinch is ultimately a moving meditation on grief, fate, and the power of art to both heal and haunt us. The titular painting is the vivid thread connecting all of the storylines in an emotional, thought-provoking way. I found myself constantly contemplating the symbolism behind this seemingly simple work.
Without a doubt, this is Tartt at the height of her talents as a storyteller. She juggles an immense cast of characters and complex plot points effortlessly. Even hundreds of pages in, I never once skimmed - I was fully transported by this endlessly absorbing read from start to finish. The Goldfinch is a true modern masterpiece that has remained etched in my memory since. I know I'll be revisiting this one many times to come.… (mais)
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 17
- Also by
- 12
- Membros
- 40,879
- Popularidade
- #430
- Avaliação
- 3.9
- Críticas
- 1,458
- ISBN
- 317
- Línguas
- 23
- Marcado como favorito
- 151
- Pedras de toque
- 1,254
The main character is a Mississippian girl, who was a baby when her brother was murdered. Now nearly a teenager, and precocious and uncompromising with it, she wants to revenge her brother's death. There's probably a genre of stories about headstrong children learning too much too fast about the adult world - I felt a distinct familiarity with the general tenor of the book.
Passing over the ending, I did enjoy reading the book a lot, although I did sometimes feel that Tartt wasn't at the top of her game. Some passages left me struggling to know what was going on. These things just make it feel like it was rushed out a bit (and it could have been a little shorter than its 600 odd pages - but, again, perhaps she didn't have time to write a shorter novel).
And that's the annoying thing - particularly having emotionally invested in the characters for 600 pages: there's nothing wrong with the book that wasn't fixable. And it could have been good.… (mais)