White Swan, Black Swan: Stories

Adrienne Sharp

Des 2008 · Dijual oleh Ballantine Books

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The world's most famous choreographer becomes infatuated with a coltish young dancer who proves both siren and muse. A rising star plunges into an affair with a principal but finds that ecstasy on the stage can't be surpassed in the bed. A dying legend reflects on the evanescent beauty of a life of gesture, lost to everything but memory.

Each bittersweet story plants the reader amid a cast of dancers and choreographers who struggle—valiantly, playfully, fiercely—to find in the rigorous discipline and animating beauty of ballet a counterbalance to the chaos of unscripted life. Many of the tales dare to imagine the inner lives of the century's titans—Balanchine, Fonteyn and Nureyev—which rival in emotional complexity and pathos the classic dramas they enacted onstage: La Bayadere, Don Quixote, Swan Lake.

White Swan, Black Swan translates the pure and essential gestures of ballet into starkly elegant prose while showing the sweat and sex beneath the serene surface. Adrienne Sharp's debut is a bravura performance.

Tentang pengarang

Adrienne Sharp studied ballet from the age of seven and trained with the prestigious Harkness Ballet in New York. She received a master's degree with honors from the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a Hoyns Fellowship in Fiction from the University of Virginia. She lives in California with her husband and two children.