Items related to Nothing Lasts Forever: Three Novellas
In these three novellas, spouses and lovers are at the edge of themselves, saying the unsayable, doing the undoable, challenging us to keep our eyes open to disintegration and pain. At the core of each tale is an erotic intensity, realized in urgent prose and unforgettable stories.
"Into the Green Ocean Deep" portrays a husband’s last days with a dying mistress as they explore the last flames of eroticism and transgression. After she dies, the husband’s wife returns. He said to his wife, or thinks he said, on a morning with a sunrise because he remembers a whiskey in his hand, Regarding my fidelity to the dead woman, even though she’s dead, what to do I don’t know.” Negative Space takes place as a man sits on a French terrace overlooking a three-hundred-year-old olive grove at sunset and listens as his wife confesses her love for someone else. Inviolate begins with a wife at the bedside of her comatose husband after a stroke has left him disabled and soon to die. A remarkable act of recollection occurs: once coma defined the limit of her husband’s existence, for the rest of it he was as well as he would ever be, and so his wife at the foot of the bed observed that this was as good as he was going to look."
"Into the Green Ocean Deep" portrays a husband’s last days with a dying mistress as they explore the last flames of eroticism and transgression. After she dies, the husband’s wife returns. He said to his wife, or thinks he said, on a morning with a sunrise because he remembers a whiskey in his hand, Regarding my fidelity to the dead woman, even though she’s dead, what to do I don’t know.” Negative Space takes place as a man sits on a French terrace overlooking a three-hundred-year-old olive grove at sunset and listens as his wife confesses her love for someone else. Inviolate begins with a wife at the bedside of her comatose husband after a stroke has left him disabled and soon to die. A remarkable act of recollection occurs: once coma defined the limit of her husband’s existence, for the rest of it he was as well as he would ever be, and so his wife at the foot of the bed observed that this was as good as he was going to look."
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About the Author:
Robert Steiner is a master. His work ranks alongside J G Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Salter. One cannot overstate his importance as an American stylist in the 21st century. He is the author of several books including Matinee, Quill, The Catastrophe, and Bathers. He now lives in Florida.
From Booklist:
In an interview with January Magazine to promote a previous book, Dreamtime (2004), Steiner stated that one reason he writes is to stave off a mental death, to stay the inevitable decline of cognition. This may explain the dark elegance of his often-difficult prose stylings, and these three novellas, rooted in decay, infidelity, and death, address these themes explicitly. “Into the Green Ocean Deep” details a woman’s slow death and the indulgent depravity she and her lover enjoy in her last days and nights. Steiner’s nauseating obsession and incessant repetition stay painfully true to the events portrayed. “Inviolate” revolves around the ruminations of an adulteress as her husband lies comatose, and “Negative Space” tells the story of a decades-long affair in the voice of the cuckolded husband. While tobacco plumes, stiff whisky, and graphic ejaculation predominate, it is Steiner’s ability to illuminate life’s darkest edges that allows diligent readers to confront the bleak oblivion of trust betrayed. Readers of Paul Auster, John Hawkes, and Peter Nádas will be up for the challenge. --Diego Báez
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- PublisherCounterpoint
- Publication date2025
- ISBN 10 1619024780
- ISBN 13 9781619024786
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages288
- Rating
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