{"product_id":"a-thousand-acres-easton-press-signed-collectors-edition","title":"A Thousand Acres (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSMILEY, Jane.\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cem\u003eA Thousand Acres.\u003c\/em\u003e Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2008.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eOctavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 371 pp. \u003cstrong\u003eSigned Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and bookplate adhered to front endpaper.\u003c\/strong\u003e Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eJane Smiley (b. 1949) was born in Los Angeles and grew up in St. Louis. She took her PhD at the University of Iowa, where she subsequently taught, and has produced a body of work of remarkable range: novels from the medieval Iceland of \u003cem\u003eThe Greenlanders\u003c\/em\u003e (1988) to the contemporary California of the \u003cem\u003eLast Hundred Years\u003c\/em\u003e trilogy, as well as criticism, memoir, and nonfiction on subjects from horses to Shakespeare. \u003cem\u003eA Thousand Acres\u003c\/em\u003e won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and remains her best-known novel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eThe premise is among the most audacious in contemporary American fiction: a transposition of \u003cem\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/em\u003e to a thousand-acre farm in Zebulon County, Iowa, in 1979. Larry Cook is the patriarch — a successful, respected farmer who abruptly announces that he will divide his land among his three daughters. Ginny and Rose, the two elder daughters who have stayed on the farm with their husbands, accept. Caroline, the youngest, a lawyer in Des Moines who has made a life away from the land, hesitates — and is immediately and furiously cut out of the inheritance. The Lear parallel unfolds from there with the logic of a tragedy: the father's deterioration, the unravelling of the family, the old secrets that rise to the surface when the structures that contained them are disturbed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eWhat Smiley adds to Shakespeare's framework is a radical act of narrative reassignment: the novel is told entirely from Ginny's perspective — Goneril, in the original — and the daughters who in \u003cem\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/em\u003e are the villains become, in this retelling, women whose behaviour is legible only when the history behind it is understood. The novel makes that history explicit, and in doing so performs a sustained feminist re-reading of one of the most powerful patriarchal narratives in Western literature. It is a novel that treats the Iowa landscape — the flat, engineered fertility of tiled and drained and fertilised land — with the same attentiveness it brings to its characters, and that draws a quiet, steady parallel between the management of the land and the management of women. The 1997 film adaptation starred Michelle Pfeiffer as Ginny, Jessica Lange as Rose, and Jason Robards as Larry Cook.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNear fine.\u003c\/strong\u003e A few small patches of loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to fore-edge gilt. Otherwise fine throughout.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eThis book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: \u003ca href=\"mailto:rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au\" title=\"Harry Hartog Rare Book Department\"\u003erarebooks@harryhartog.com.au\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCatalogue Number: HH000536\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jane Smiley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49087354503411,"sku":"1110002990618","price":100.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/4284\/5939\/files\/1_d69b14d0-081c-4669-b18f-0ce4b71b6c09.png?v=1779152223","url":"https:\/\/www.harryhartog.com.au\/products\/a-thousand-acres-easton-press-signed-collectors-edition","provider":"Harry Hartog Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}