Download Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend AudioBook Free
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Champion
Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Getting rid of Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as you vast mysterious novel, but because of its span it was formerly broken up into three catalogs. In this bold new making, Matthiessen has minimize nearly a third of the entire content material and collapsed enough time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his individuals with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, knowing his original eyesight.
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the crazy Florida frontier at the switch of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the star of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who largely admired him, in a getting rid of that obsessed his favorite kid.
Shadow Country traverses bizarre panoramas and frontier hinterlands inhabited by People in america of every provenance and color, including the dark-colored and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s better half detected, "still casts its shadow over the country."
Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to determine more and more."
Reward for Shadow Country
“Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as practically any inside our books. This impressive, unfortunate masterpiece about race, background, and defeated dreams may easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little think about, too, that elements of the storyline of E.J. Watson contact comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, undoubtedly, Faulkner. Atlanta divorce attorneys way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once background, fiction, and myth–as well as the capstone to the career of one of the very most admired and admirable writers in our time.” — The New York Review of Books
“Magnificent and capacious…. I'll just say right here that the publication had taken my sleeve and like the historic mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a fresh thing…. Finally now we have these catalogs welded such as a bell, and with Watson's track the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate….a breathtaking saga.” — The LA Times
“Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen’s] career, just as ambitious as Moby Dick.” — National Geographic Excursion mag
“Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better…[He] deserves credit for many years of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson star into critically acclaimed books….Anyone needing an explanation for what occurred to Florida can now find it in one novel, a great American novel.” — Miami Herald
“Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he's also writing about the life span of the country during the period of half a century. Watson's history is essentially the storyline of the American frontier, of the conquering of crazy lands and folks, and of what such empires cost….Even among a body of are impressive as Matthiessen's, this is his great publication.” — St. Petersburg Times
“Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating individuals, lyrical in talking about panoramas, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of the nation.” --Seattle Times
“Shadow Country” can be an ambitious, lasting, and significant work of books that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen’s integrity as an musician that he experienced compelled to return to the Watson materials to produce this work and satisfy his original eyesight….a multifaceted work that can be read variously or together as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a puzzle. -- East Hampton Star
“Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American books…this reworking…is remarkable….Where Watson was a magnificent personality before, he comes across as nothing less than iconic here; it’s difficult to find another physique in American books so carefully and confincingly portrayed.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick and choose of the Week
“Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy’s books…a mosaic about the life span and lynch-mob death of an turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer called E. J. Watson — in to the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were minimize from the books, previous background individuals now tromp to the foreground, and the catalogs’ rangy, Faulknerian fact is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of an novel.” — Men’s Journal
"The fiction of Peter Matthiessen 's the reason a lot of folks in my technology made a decision to be writers. Without doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." -- Richard Ford
"Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious copy writer, an inspired anatomist of the North american mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." -- Joyce Carol Oates
"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has turned into a unique achievement in his own technology and in American books all together. Exactly what he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply educated, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted practically thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the sooner trilogy, is his transmutation of computer to represent his original eyesight. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin
