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Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel
Author:
Quindlen, Anna
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
Demand: Moderate
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LC: PS3567.U
Print Run: 150000
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ISBN-13: 9781400065752
LCCN: 2013015992
Imprint: Random House
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Pub Date: 01/28/2014
Availability: Available
List: $26.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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252 pages ; 25 cm
H 9.6",
W 6.63",
D 1.01",
1.1206 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Blockbuster List
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Booklist High-Demand Hot List
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Library Journal Bestsellers
Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Fiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
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Awards:
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Starred Reviews:
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TIPS Subjects:
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Romance
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Sagas
FICTION / Women
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LC Subjects:
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Life change events, Fiction
Love stories
Pastoral fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Life change events, Fiction
Love stories
Pastoral fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 08/01/2013 |
| Former world-renowned photographer Rebecca Winter reopens her inner eye to discover the beauty waiting for her in her new country home. With help from a local named Jim Bates, she's about to discover that you don't need a camera to see the beauty all around you. 272pp., 150K, Auth res: New York, NY, Tour |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 02/01/2014 |
| "Rebecca Winter" remains a household name, thanks to the iconic photograph "Still Life with Bread Crumbs" that catapulted her art career into the public eye. But Rebecca Winter, the person, has changed significantly in the decades since she captured that domestic image of her kitchen counter after her husband and son retired for the evening. She's no longer married, for one. And it's been so long since she made a significant sale that she can no longer afford the upscale Manhattan apartment that contains the kitchen immortalized in that famous picture. As a result, the 60-year-old Rebecca feels adrift when she sublets her home and moves into a rented cottage in rural New York. Each time a royalty check hits her bank account, the couple-hundred-dollar deposit leaves her feeling momentarily rich. Some other people in the small town are familiar with "Still Life" and consider Rebecca something of a celebrity, but she is often left to her own thoughts. That solitude gives Rebecca plenty of time to figure out whether her camera is still the best way to share what she sees with the world--and to determine who she is outside of the context of high-end art galleries and New York City. In Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Anna Quindlen deconstructs the typical form of a novel. Chapters toggle between Rebecca's present and the formative moments that brought her here, with each chapter title lending insight into the path Rebecca walks. The result is refreshing pacing; the story doesn't unfold in linear fashion, but in bits and pieces at a time. Still Life is a journey of self-exploration, of getting to know who you are rather than who others expect you to be. It's a meditation on art, age and commercialism wrapped up in a delightful story--perhaps the best-selling author's finest novel yet. Carla Jean Whitley. 272pg. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Booklist | 11/01/2013 |
| Rebecca Winter was once a famous photographer, and, with any luck, she will be again. Having achieved surprising early success with her feminist "Kitchen Counter" collection, Rebecca, now 60, finds herself on fame and fortune's flip side. With her former torrent of royalties dwindling to a trickle, Rebecca has been forced to give up her perfect Manhattan apartment for a paltry upstate cabin, and with marauding raccoons, stray dogs, and trigger-happy hunters, life in the country is proving to be no walk in Central Park. Luckily, Rebecca still has her camera, and she soon finds inspiration for new work in unexpected places, often in the company of a bird-watching roofer named Jim, whose quiet companionship proves to be just the balm she needs to fully embrace her unfamiliar surroundings. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and star in the pantheon of domestic fiction (Every Last One, 2010), Quindlen presents instantly recognizable characters who may be appealingly warm and nonthreatening, but that only serves to drive home her potent message that it's never too late to embrace life's second chances.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Quindlen will hit the road with her latest novel, backed by a mammoth media promotional campaign. Haggas, Carol. 256p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 11/15/2013 |
| A photographer retreats to a rustic cottage, where she confronts aging and flagging career prospects. Rebecca Winter is known for her Kitchen Counter series, black-and-white photographs capturing domestic minutia, taken as her marriage to a philandering Englishman is foundering on the shoals of mistaken assumptions. But, as her laconic and un-nurturing agent, TG, never fails to remind her, what has she done lately? Her photo royalties are in precipitous decline. Divorced, living in a high-priced Manhattan apartment, Rebecca, 60, finds herself unmoored. Her filmmaker son, Ben, still requires checks from Mom. Her mother, Bebe, is in the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm, where she spends her days playing piano pieces on any available surface, except an actual piano. Since the collapse of the family business, Rebecca has supported both her parents and now pays Bebe's nursing home bills. She figures that it will be cheaper to sublet her apartment and rent a ramshackle woodland cabin upstate than to continue to ape the NYC lifestyle of her formerly successful self. She meets the usual eccentrics who people so many fictional small towns, although in Quindlen's hands, these archetypes are convincingly corporeal. Sarah runs the English-themed Tea for Two cafe, not exactly to the taste of most locals. Until Rebecca came to town, Sarah's only regular was Tad, ex-boy soprano, now working clown. Sarah's ne'er-do-well husband, Kevin, sells Rebecca subpar firewood and is admonished by Jim, an upstanding local hero. After helping Rebecca remove a marauding raccoon, Jim helps her find work photographing wild birds. Like Rebecca, Jim is divorced and has onerous family responsibilities, in his case, his bipolar sister who requires constant surveillance. As Rebecca interacts with these townsfolk--and embarks on a new photo series--she begins to understand how provisional her former life--and self--really was. Occasionally profound, always engaging, but marred by a formulaic resolution in which rewards and punishments are meted out according to who ranks highest on the niceness scale. 272pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal | 11/01/2013 |
| Formerly a world-famous photographer, Rebecca Winter is past her prime and out of her element. Her photographs are yesterday's news, her family has fallen apart, and her bank balance is inching toward negative numbers. When she can no longer afford her luxurious Manhattan apartment, Rebecca sublets and moves to a small cabin in the middle of nowhere, on a road that has no name. Away from the noise and clatter of the city, she finds peace in a quiet country life, inspiration in the form of mysterious shrines she discovers hidden deep in the woods, and unexpected love with a husky roofer 30 years her junior. VERDICT Pulitzer Prize winner Quindlen has made a home at the top of the best sellers lists with novels that capture the grace and frailty of everyday life (Object Lessons; Blessings), and her latest work is sure to take her there again. With spare, elegant prose, she crafts a poignant glimpse into the inner life of an aging woman who discovers that reality contains much more color than her own celebrated black-and-white images. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/13.]. Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY. 272p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 08/26/2013 |
| Photographer Rebecca Winter was once famed worldwide for images like Still Life with Bread Crumbs, for which she is best known. But now her success has faded, as has her income, and she's sublet her big-city apartment and moved to a cabin in the woods. A need for home repairs leads her to roofer Jim Bates, and by the novel's closing pages she has love, a new view of the world, and a shiny tin roof. Upbeat romance from the socially astute Quindlen; with an eight-city tour to New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Miami, Kansas City (MO), Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco. 272p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 10/14/2013 |
| Quindlen's seventh novel, following Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, is a detailed exploration of creativity and the need for connection. Rebecca Winter is a 60-year-old photographer, once revered as a feminist icon, whose work isn't selling as briskly as it used to. She needs a fresh start after her marriage falls apart because her husband trades her in for a younger model (as he does every 10 years). She rents a cabin in the country while subletting her beloved New York City apartment, needing both the money and the space in which to find her creative spark again. Jim Bates, a local roofer who helps her with the challenges of moving into the cottage, becomes a new friend, as does a dog that seems to prefer living with her rather than with its neglectful owner. Rebecca also finds new objects to photograph in the series of homemade wooden crosses she discovers during hikes in the surrounding woods, without realizing their connection to a tragedy in Jim's life. Quindlen has always excelled at capturing telling details in a story, and she does so again in this quiet, powerful novel, showing the charged emotions that teem beneath the surface of daily life. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Feb.). 272p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9781400065752,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 02/09/2014 |
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