Staff Pick
Reading this book is like watching your emotionally repressed dad cry. A moving portrait of a quiet academic life, Stoner left my head ringing like a struck bell for days after I put it down. Recommended By Kai B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Review
"Stoner, by John Williams, is a slim novel, and not a particularly joyous one. But it is so quietly beautiful and moving, so precisely constructed, that you want to read it in one sitting and enjoy being in it, altered somehow, as if you have been allowed to wear an exquisitely tailored garment that you don’t want to take off." The Globe and Mail
Review
"One of the great forgotten novels of the past century. I have bought at least 50 copies of it in the past few years, using it as a gift for friends…The book is so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic." Colum McCann, Top 10 Novels, The Guardian
Review
"Williams' descriptions of the experience of reading both elucidate and evince the pleasures of literary language; the 'minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words' in which Stoner finds joy are re-enacted in Williams’ own perfect fusion of words." n+1
Review
"The book begins boldly with a mention of Stoner’s death, and a nod to his profound averageness: 'Few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.' By the end, though, Williams has made Stoner’s disappointing life into such a deep and honest portrait, so unsoftened and unromanticized, that it’s quietly breathtaking." The Boston Globe
Review
"I have read few novels as deep and as clear as Stoner. It deserves to be called a quiet classic of American literature." Chad Harbach
Review
"A beautiful and moving novel, as sweeping, intimate, and mysterious as life itself." Geoff Dyer
Review
"Stoner is a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer." Ruth Rendell
Review
"One of the great unheralded 20th-century American novels …Almost perfect." Bret Easton Ellis
Review
"A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life…I’m amazed a novel this good escaped general attention for so long." Ian McEwan
About the Author
John Edward Williams (1922 – 1994) was an American author, editor and professor. He was best known for his novels Stoner (1965) and Augustus (1972), which won a U.S. National Book Award.