John Gardner

New Directions is excited to reissue the Gardner classics, beginning with October Light, a complex relationship rendered in a down-to-earth narrative....

John Gardner's thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: "True art is by its nature moral." It is also an audacious statement, as Gardner asserts an inherent value in life and art. Since the book's first publication, the passion behind Gardner's assertion has both provoked and inspired fans....

On Becoming a Novelist contains the wisdom accumulated during John Gardner's distinguished twenty-year career as a fiction writer and creative writing teacher....

John Gardner's sweeping portrait of the collision of opposing philosophical perspectives in 1960s America, centering on the appearance of a mysterious stranger in a small upstate New York town....

This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.

Written with passion and insight, this a must-listen for those interested in Chaucer and the medieval time period....

When at 42, the obese, anxious, and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells, it is much more than years which define the gulf between them....

The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements....

In this posthumously published collection of his essays and reviews, acclaimed novelist John Gardner discusses the craft of fiction writing, taking to task some of his best-known contemporaries in the process....

Laid to waste by drink, Agathon, a seer, is a shell of a man. He sits imprisoned with his apprentice, Peeker, for his presumed involvement in a rebellion against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos....

In a gloomy mansion in Madison, Wisconsin, a sheltered and sensitive young man slips a visiting professor his secret manuscript....

A mythological masterpiece about dedication and the disintegration of romantic affection....

When Professor James Chandler learns he is dying from leukemia, he moves his family to his childhood home in Batavia, New York....

In this wonderful fantasy, John Gardner weaves tales within tales to bring a magical world to vivid life....

Martin and Joan Orrick - distant cousins who have known each other since early childhood - are in the final throes of a failing marriage. Martin is a compulsive drinker....