Bücher von Joanna Scott

"A greatly gifted and highly original artist...Various Antidotes is purely and simply wonderful."--The New York Times Book ReviewThe miraculous, transformative stories of Joanna Scott's Various Antidotes range across the world of history and science, alighting on figures both real and imaginary. The stories within are those of obsession and brilliance, of the ultimately human recognition that the world is larger than we believe it to be and that we, as figures within it, have through understanding the power to change that world. Whether through learning or madness or accident, the scientists and students within Various Antidotes expose us to the glorious blossom of the natural world.

In Joanna Scott's breakthrough novel Arrogance, the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles-wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, Joanna Scott's The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

When four-year-old Bo is orphaned in the car accident that kills his mother, he becomes the focus of a fierce custody struggle and flees into himself -- away from the sea of strangers -- where he inhabits an eerie inner landscape. The world of "make believe" into which we are drawn in this remarkable novel -- hailed for both its lyrical prose and its profound dramatic and emotional intensity -- is the world of four-year-old Bo, cast adrift in a sea of strangers as he becomes the focus of a fierce custody battle between two sets of grandparents, one black and one white. "This is a compelling story that will leave readers haunted by Scott's powerful moral vision."-Publishers' Weekly