A01=Seth Lerer
acceptance
actor
adolescence
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Author_Seth Lerer
autobiography
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biography
bonding
books
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGLA
Category=DNBL1
Category=DSB
childrens literature
classics
coming out
communication
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
english
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fairy tales
family
fatherhood
fathers and sons
folklore
gay
homosexuality
Language_English
lgbt
lgbtq
lgbtqia
love
masculinity
memoir
noel coward
nonfiction
PA=Available
parenting
performance
performing arts
plays
Price_€20 to €50
professor
PS=Active
queer
softlaunch
teacher
theater
tolerance
Product details
- ISBN 9780226014418
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 05 Apr 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciousnesses and almost two epochs." That's how Edmund Gosse opened "Father and Son", the classic 1907 book about his relationship with his father. Seth Lerer's "Prospero's Son" is, as fits our latter days, altogether more complicated, layered, and multivalent, but at its heart is that same problem: the fraught relationship between fathers and sons. At the same time, Lerer's memoir is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man's life, and the transformative magic of words and performance. A flamboyantly performative father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. A bookish boy becomes a professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children's books that set him on his path in the first place. And when that boy grows up, he learns how hard it is to be a father and how much books can, and cannot, instruct him. Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories - the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.
"A child is a man in small letter," wrote Bishop John Earle in the seventeenth century. "His father hath writ him as his own little story." With "Prospero's Son", Seth Lerer acknowledges the author of his story while simultaneously reminding us that we all confront the blank page of life on our own, as authors of our lives.
Seth Lerer is dean of arts and humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many books, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter.
