Midsummer Nights [Hardcover]

Jeanette Winterson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2009

In 2009, the Glyndebourne Festival of Opera reaches its 75th year. In commemoration of this event, Jeanette Winterson has brought together some of the best loved and most critically acclaimed authors writing today to pen stories inspired by opera. A foreword from Ralph Fiennes and an introduction by Jeanette Winterson are followed by: Alexander McCall Smith on Cosi Fan Tutte; Ali Smith on Fidelio; Andrew Motion on Peter Grimes; Andrew O'Hagan on Eugene Onegin; Ann Enright on Rusalka;; Colm Toibin on Pearl Fishers; Jackie Kay on The Makropulos Case; Joanna Trollope on L'Elisir d'Amore; John Mortimer on Cosi Fan Tutte; Julie Myerson on The Crowning of Poppaea; Kate Atkinson on La Traviata; Kate Mosse on Pelleas et Melisande; Lynne Truss on The Turn of the Screw; Marina Warner on Dido and Aeneas; Posy Simmonds double page of 'Glyndebourne Midsummer Night'; Ruth Rendell on Theodora; Sebastian Barry on Natoma; Toby Litt on Don Giovanni.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Lynne Truss's chilling little version of The Turn of the Screw is funny and pointed Kate Atkinson, who has the quasi-musical ability to write narrative voices in counterpoint, gives us a witty and touching duet between celebrity culture and La Traviata Atkinson brilliantly combines sentimental appeal and a deadpan tone Toby Litt's The Ghost raises the hairs on the back of your neck a varied and enjoyable collection' Times Literary Supplement. 'The strongest and wittiest anthology of short fiction to appear for years: a superior selection box of irresistible delights' The Tablet.

About the Author

Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. Since then she has written eight other novels, including The Passion and been published in 32 countries, as well as adapting her work for TV, film and stage. She lives in Gloucestershire and London.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Quercus (April 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847248047
• ISBN-13: 978-1847248046
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,574,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kate Mosse is the author of the # 1 International bestseller LABYRINTH, and a presenter for BBC television and radio in London. Born in 1961, she grew up in West Sussex, England, she read English at Oxford and holds honorary MAs from Oxford and Chichester Universities. A publisher for seven years, she is the Co-Founder & Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Orange Award for New Writers, the prestigious annual literary awards celebrating international writing in English by women. She is also a television and radio presenter for the BBC in London, fronting such series as 'The Readers & Writers Roadshow' and 'Open Book.'

Previous books include Becoming a Mother and The House: Behind the Scenes at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, as well as two novels Eskimo Kissing and Crucifix Lane. LABYRINTH, her international # 1 bestseller, was published in the UK in July 2005. A Sunday Times #1 bestseller in hardback and paperback, and a New York Times Top 10 bestseller, it was the over all best selling book in the UK for 2006 and won 'Best Read of the Year' in the British Book Awards. It is also shortlisted for the IMPAC international literary award, for a CWA Steel Dagger and has been shortlisted for 'Author of the Year' for the 2007 British Book Awards. LABYRINTH is published in 40 countries.

A former Executive Director of Chichester Festival Theatre, Kate is a member of the Royal Society of Arts, a Board member of the international sponsorship organisation Arts & Business, Kate was named International Woman of Achievement in 2000 for her contribution to the Arts.

Kate lives with her husband and two teenage children in Sussex, England, and Carcassonne, southwest France.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Operatic Hits and Misses, February 4, 2010

By 

Lawrence D. Devoe "OperaDoc" (Augusta,GA,USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Midsummer Nights (Hardcover)

A collection of short stories commissioned for the Glyndebourne Festival includes submissions by some of today's leading UK authors. Each story is intended to spin off the themes of operas both well and not so well known. This proves an interesting concept as part of the fun of reading this book is to figure out which operas are represented in each story. For the most part, this is not a challenge as the majority of these stories identify the opera in question straight off. Taken as a whole, this is an uneven volume. Fortunately, with an anthology of short stories, the reader can pick and choose. Some stories rise to significant heights, eg, "My Lovely Countess" (Le Nozze di Figaro), "First Snow" (Eugen Onegin), "First Lady of Song" (Makropoulos Affair). Others make you wonder, why bother?: "Fidelio and Bess,"(Fidelio and Porgy and Bess), "To Die For" (La Traviata), and "Forget my fate" (Dido and Aeneas) However, there is one real gem in this collection, "Freedom," which relates an apochryphal story of the great Irish tenor John McCormack. In it, he performs a little known opera "Natoma" (about native Americans) to a tribe of real native Americans in the Western Plains. This book will appeal primarily to operaphiles as many of the insider references will simply seem obscure to most readers. As an aid to the latter group,the appendix lists synopses of the cited operas as well as brief bios of the contributing authors. Despite some caveats, there is enjoyment to be found in this book and if you don't care for the writing, there are some great cartoons in its mid-section.

4.0 out of 5 stars Summer reading for (some) operaphile(s), July 19, 2011

By 

B. Hotchkiss "boito" (Northeastern MA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Midsummer Nights (Paperback)

I don't really know what qualifies as "summer reading," but I'll bet this collection comes close. As you would expect with any anthology, this one is spotty. Some very good stories, even one or two worth re-reading; others something less than up to their author's par, but no real clunkers. I recommend suspending any expectation you may have for any given story to reflect something of the opera that supposedly inspired it. About five or six stories into the book, I discovered that giving up that notion and just going along for the ride gave certain of them more heft. Some of these pieces make me wonder if their authors have ever darkened the door of an opera house (or even listened to recordings or their selected jumping-off point), however.