Homer and Langley (Hardcover) ~ E.L. Doctorow (Author) Cover Art

Homer and Langley (Hardcover)

By: E.L. Doctorow (Author)


List Price: $26.00
Tower Price: $18.83
You Save: $7.17 (28%)
Add to BagAdd to Bag Click to go directly to the checkout.
This item qualifies for FREE Shop N' Save Shipping for orders over $25. Check individual shipping price. *Some Restrictions Apply.
Availability: In Stock
Share This:
Add To KaboodleAdd To Kaboodle  Submit To Digg!Submit To Digg!  Share On FacebookShare On Facebook  Add to FavoritesAdd to Favorites  TwitterTwitter 

Product Description



Run a Quick Search on "Homer and Langley" by E.L. Doctorow to Browse Related Products:

Browse more products related to "Homer and Langley"

Browse more products related to "E.L. Doctorow"


Review

"If the novel succeeds in making us care about the Collyers, the reason is Mr. Doctorow's own whiplash use of language, a daring, poetic meditation in prose of the kind that is familiar from his earlier novels....The author presents both men as heroic pioneers who discover their own inner music and logic, choosing to remove themselves from all the bitter debris and turmoil beyond the walls of their mansion."

"[A]n intriguing character study and an elegantly written exploration of isolation....Doctorow's great success here is in reaching past the joke to make us feel his anguish."

"The achievement of Doctorow's masterly , compassionate double portrait is that it succeeds for 200 pages in suspending the snigger, elevating the Collyers beyond caricature and turning them into creatures of their times instead of figures of fun."

"[A] beautiful and haunting novel....Doctorow is clear and compassionate in detailing [the brothers'] stunted emotions and phobias, and he creates a surprising kind of suspense as the stuff piles up, and the house begins to close around them into a big, messy tomb....Doctorow's writing is so lithe, the book easily sustains all of its thematic musings - about technology and history and consumer culture, even the novelist as kind of housebound Quixote."

"[B]uoyant and entertaining....E. L. Doctorow...[is] a writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy....In HOMER & LANGLEY, [he] has evoked an American folk-myth writ small, a touching double portrait of men whom social background and class privilege could not protect from extinction."

"Wizardly Doctorow presents an ingenious, haunting odyssey that unfolds within a labyrinth built out of the detritus of war and excess." (starred review)

Publisher's note

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.
Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers-the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers-wars, political movements, technological advances-and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.
Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York's fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.

A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements. By the National Book Award-winning author of Billy Bathgate.

A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements. By the National Book Award-winning author of Billy Bathgate.

Annotation

The real-life Homer and Langley Collyer were two wildly eccentric aristocratic brothers who lived together in a three-story Harlem mansion surrounded by 103 tons of avidly collected trash (including, among other oddities, the full chassis of a Model T Ford). National Book Award-winning author E.L. Doctorow has taken this outlandish tale as the inspiration for his novel, narrated by the blind Homer, who comes to rely on his brilliant but war-damaged brother Langley for survival. Despite the Collyer's constant attempts to hide from the world, Doctorow uses the brothers as a means to describe the shifting forces of American history outside their junk-shuttered windows. Indeed, Langley has become convinced that history repeats itself, and by relentlessly hoarding newspapers, he will eventually be able to predict the future. A grand, mad, and deeply touching tale, HOMER & LANGLEY creates an unforgettable portrait of two men lost on the fringes of society.



Customer Reviews for "Homer and Langley (Hardcover)" by E.L. Doctorow (Author)

There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!

Submit your Review




Explore More Great Tower Sales & Specials



Tower.com BOOK Sales, Promotions & Special Features

Tower.com Popular Book Wiki Articles

  • The Paperback
    Learn more information on the paperback format before choosing which type of book to purchase.
  • The E-Book
    What exactly is an "electronic book?" Learn before you buy with Tower Wiki!
  • The Audio Book
    Do you prefer to read or be read to? Learn more about this increasingly popular book format.

Interact with Tower.com