Giovanni's Gift [Hardcover]

Bradford MORROW (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Viking 1996 (1996)
• ISBN-10: 1299025897
• ISBN-13: 978-1299025899
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal "Conjunctions" and writing novels.

His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.

In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.

His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."

Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great book, March 2, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Hardcover)

I read about this book and thought it couldn't be as good as they said it was. It is! I grew up in the West, and the author's way with painting images of the Western landscape just kept sending these little shocks through me, it was so true. Plus there's really good, deep writing about families and a love-story that breaks your heart. It's been a long time since a novel has kept me up at night and caused me to wake in the morning with a sore neck, but Giovanni's Gift did. It's the kind of book you want to give to friends

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant! Inspired! (At least to my tiny 13 year old mind.), April 12, 2001

By 

"silveryflute" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Mass Market Paperback)

I loved Mr. Morrow's writing style and prose. Some people say it was boring, but I thought it was just enough to pull you into the book. I found it very suspenseful towards the end, and was somewhat surprised by the ending. I enjoyed the book immensely.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, well written, good read, August 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Hardcover)

I would have rated this book a ten except for the fact that at times it is overdescriptive and slows the tension of the story. That said I must admit as a writer that I was a little green with envy at Morrow's gift of prose. This is a facinating mystery as well as just a well written narrative. This is the first in its genre that I did not feel compelled to try to figure it out until the end, I just let the reading come and enjoyed it a lot