John Irving

@johnirving

Public Figure (curated)
Male
Author, Writing
Exeter, United States
02. March

John Winslow Irving is an American-Canadian novelist and screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year have been bestsellers.

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License Notice: © Elke Wetzig/CC-BY-SA, John Irving at Cologne 2010 (7108), CC BY-SA 3.0

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John Irving recommended Death in Venice in Books (curated)

 
Death in Venice
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann | 2005 | Fiction & Poetry, History & Politics
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"In Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, a great writer is as endangered by his repressed passions as he is by the cholera plague. I was a young fiction writer who wanted to be an artist at what I did. Why wouldn't I be interested, as Mann was, in the nature of the artist?"

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The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy | 2010 | Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"As for fate, and how you can't escape yours: Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is pretty harsh. A guy sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter; he can never atone for that. And Hardy's critics wanted him to write more uplifting endings!"

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John Irving recommended Fifth Business in Books (curated)

 
Fifth Business
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies | 2001 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"In the Robertson Davies novel Fifth Business, that first-chapter snowball gave me the idea for the baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany, whose initials (O.M.) are modeled on the Grass hero of The Tin Drum (Oskar Matzerath). When I was married in Toronto, Davies read from the Bible at the wedding. "There is something of Byron about John Irving," Davies once wrote about me. Yes, I suppose so, and something of Dickens about Robertson Davies."

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John Irving recommended The Scarlet Letter in Books (curated)

 
The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1850 | Fiction & Poetry
6.8 (24 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, those churchwomen gossiping about what they would do to Hester - not mark her clothes but brand her forehead, or kill her - would later drive me to make sexual explicitness and sexual minorities features of many of my novels."

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John Irving recommended Giovanni's Room in Books (curated)

 
Giovanni's Room
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin | 2007 | Essays
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"I was still too young to drive a car when I read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The concept of a devastating and doomed love story - one that was also modern ' hadn't occurred to me. I thought nothing would ever compare to Romeo and Juliet, but Baldwin's story of "the night that is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life" became the saddest love story I know."

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John Irving recommended Madame Bovary in Books (curated)

 
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert | 1970 | Essays
6.0 (5 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"When I first read Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I was some years away from being married, and still a few years away from imagining I ever would be. What did the adulteries and suicide of a doctor's wife in provincial France matter to me? A lot. As my first editor once said to me, "I've known a number of adulterous women." (I didn't doubt that he had.) "But the one I know best, and will never forget, is Emma Bovary.""

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John Irving recommended The Tin Drum in Books (curated)

 
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass | 2010 | Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"I was older - a college student - when I read the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum. The 19-century novel was the model of the form, for me; here was 19th-century storytelling about 20th-century social behavior, sexuality, and politics."

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One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa | 2000 | Fiction & Poetry
8.5 (11 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"I had a similar experience with the Garcia Marquez novel A Hundred Years of Solitude. In miraculous Macondo, the ordinary and supernatural are entwined; incest and intermarriage give many generations of the Buendia family a classically Greek and predestined future."

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