Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

William Boyd

jan 2011. · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

O ovoj e-knjizi

"Plant one bamboo shoot-cut bamboo for the rest of your life." William Boyd's prolific, fruitful career is a testament to this old Chinese saying. Boyd penned his first book review in 1978-the proverbial bamboo shoot-and we've been reaping the rewards ever since. Beginning with the Whitbread Award-winning A Good Man in Africa, William Boyd has written consistently artful, intelligent fiction and firmly established himself as an international man of letters. He has done nearly thirty years of research and writing for projects as diverse as a novel about an ecologist studying chimpanzees (Brazzaville Beach), an adapted screenplay about the emotional lives of soldiers (The Trench, which he also directed), and a fictional biography of an American painter (Nat Tate). All the while, Boyd has been accruing facts and wisdom-and publishing it in the form of articles, essays, and reviews.
Now available for the first time in the United States, Bamboo gathers together Boyd's writing on literature, art, the movie business, television, and autobiographical reflections on his African childhood, his years at boarding school, and the writing life. From Kurt Vonnegut to the Cannes Film Festival, from Charles Dickens to Catherine Deneuve, from mini-cabs to Cecil Rhodes, this collection is a fascinating and surprisingly revealing companion to the work of one of Britain's leading novelists.

O autoru

William Boyd was given the Costa Novel Award for his most recent novel, Restless. He is also the author of eight other novels, three collections of short stories, and thirteen screenplays that have been made into films. He has received several other awards, including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. William Boyd lives with his wife in London and southwest France.