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Easter Parade by Richard Yates — book cover

Easter Parade

by Richard Yates
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Overview

In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

Synopsis

In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

Charles McGrath

....[I]t is a sad tale of marriage and divorce, and a still sadder one of sexual liberation. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

About the Author, Richard Yates

Richard Yates, who died in 1922, was the author of seven novels, including Revolutionary Road, and two story collections. The widely celebrated Collected Stories of Richard Yates (now available from Picador) first appeared in May 2001.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters . . . A spare yet wrenching tale."—The New York Times Book Review

"An elegant, moving novel, quietly poignant."—Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post

"Invigorating and even gripping. The dialogue is artful enough to sound natural. In his descriptive prose every word works quietly to inspire the illusion that things are happening by themselves . . . A literary achievement."—Paul Gray, Time

"Exact, indisputable, and moving."—Richard Todd, The Atlantic

"Extraordinarily good . . . Written with the force and simplicity of absolute truth."—The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

"The effect is at once cruel and sweet, heartbreaking and brutal . . . The Easter Parade has an astonishing sweep and weight."—Stuart O'Nan,The Boston Book Review

Charles McGrath

....[I]t is a sad tale of marriage and divorce, and a still sadder one of sexual liberation. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Kirkus Reviews

With the recent publication of Yates's complete stories (p. 273), there's a concerted effort to restore all the work of this writer's writer (who died in 1992) to print. This melancholy tale of two sisters begins, like so many Yates narratives, with high hopes for its characters—expectations that are usually dashed by experience. When it first appeared in 1976, Kirkus noted that "nobody sings sadder songs of the way things were" than Yates, and by the novel's end, he makes "an effective shambles" of his protagonists' "muffed lives." Though they begin in youth and gladness, these sisters' lives end in despondency and sadness. Kirkus celebrated Yates's strong suit, "the thing he knows best—failure." Its gravity "gives all his books their vulnerability and makes them imperative then and now reading for many people." And now again.

Book Details

Published
May 1, 2001
Publisher
Picador
Pages
240
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780312278281

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