Signed, Brand New, First Edition, First Printing, Hardcover/Dust Jacket, List: $23.00, 375 pages
A Thousand Acres
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
by
Jane Smiley
(September 26, 1949 - present)
Smiley is the author of seventeen widely acclaimed novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author of five works of nonfiction and eight books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
A Thousand Acres was published on March 12, 1991.
First Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED, in my presence, to full title page.
No inscription; full signature only.
From an event featuring Jane Smiley in New York City on May 5, 2010.
I took the photos of Jane Smiley in conversation with Kristina Baker Kline, with a reading by Katrina Lenk at Symphony Space in New York City on April 23, 2024.
BONUSES: The book store's May 2010 event flier (see photo 12) is included.
In addition, the dust jacket is protected by a clear, removable, mylar cover.
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100% authentic guaranteed - This is my COA "Certificate of Authenticity". I won't sell any signed book that I'm not 100% sure is hand signed by the author. I attended this Jane Smiley event in New York City on May 5, 2010.
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A thousand acres, a piece of land of almost mythic proportions. Upon this fertile, nourishing earth, Jane Smiley has set her rich, breathtakingly dramatic novel of an American family whose wealth cannot stay the hand of tragedy. A Thousand Acres is the intense, compelling story of a father and his daughters, of sisters, of wives and husbands, and of the human cost of a lifetime spent trying to subdue the land and the passions it stirs. The most critically acclaimed novel of the literary season, a classic story of contemporary American life, A Thousand Acres is destined to be read for years to come.
from Publishers Weekly
If Smiley (Ordinary Love and Good Will) has previously been hailed for her insight into human nature, the moral complexity of her themes and her lucid and resonant prose, her new novel is her best yet, bringing together her extraordinary talents in a story of stunning insight and impact. "Our farm and our lives seemed secure and good," says narrator Ginny Cook, looking back on the summer before her father capriciously decided to turn over his prosperous 1000-acre Iowa farm to his three daughters and their mates. That was the same summer that Jess Clark, their neighbors' prodigal son, returned after a 13-year absence, romance and peril trailing in his wake. Although Ginny's existence as a farmer's wife and caretaker of her irascible, bullying, widower father is not easy, there are compensations in her good marriage, in the close companionship of her indomitable sister Rose, who lives across the road, and in sharing vicariously in the accomplishments of their younger sister, Caroline, a lawyer. Having managed to submerge her grief at being childless, passive Ginny has also hidden a number of darker secrets in her past. These shocking events work their way out of her subconscious in the dreadful aftermath of her father's decision to rescind his legacy, shouting accusations of filial betrayal. Like Lear's daughters, the Cook sisters each reveal their true natures in events that will leave readers gasping with astonishment. Smiley powerfully evokes the unrelenting, insular world of farm life, the symbiotic relationships between a farmer and his land as well as those among the other members of the rural community. She contrasts the stringencies of nature with those of human nature: the sting of sibling rivalry, the tensions of marriage, the psychological burdens of children, the passion of lovers. Her tightly controlled prose propels tension to nearly unbearable extremes--but always within the limits of credibility. In the end, she has raised profound questions about human conduct and moral responsibility, especially about family relationships and the guilt and bitterness they can foster. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
from Library Journal
This important new novel by the author of Ordinary Love and Good Will and The Greenlanders is, first of all, a farm novel. Smiley lovingly creates an idyllic world of family farm life in Iowa in 1979: the neat yard, freshly painted house, clean clothes on the line, and fertile, well-tended fields. The owner of these well-managed acres is Larry Cook, who abruptly decides to turn the farm over to his two eldest daughters and their husbands. Ginny and Ty are hard-working farmers who try to placate her ornery father, while sister Rose and hard-drinking Pete try to stand up to him. Dark secrets surface after the property transfer, and the family's careful world unravels with a grim inevitability reminiscent of Smiley's splendid novella Good Will. Not to be missed. --Ann H. Fisher, Radford Public Library, VA. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
from Kirkus Reviews
Lear in Iowa. In a scalding, 20th-century version of Shakespeare's tragedy, Smiley--clawing open the "ingratitude" of a monarch's elder daughters to reveal a rage that could out-tempest Lear's--once again examines the buried secret hurts within families and the deadly results when damaged egos are unleashed: "The one thing...maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open." Living under the iron order of that tyrannical, successful farmer Larry Cook, owner of 640 Iowa acres, are: daughter Rose, 34-year-old recovering cancer patient, mother of two and wife of ex-musician Pete, the perennial outsider, object of Larry's contempt; and childless Ginny, married to Tyler, an easygoing man who can betray with silence. Youngest daughter Caroline, whom motherless Rose and Ginny had raised and unfettered from Daddy, is a lawyer in Des Moines. It's at a well-liquored neighborhood social that Daddy announces he's giving up his farm to his three daughters. "I don't know," says cool lawyer Caroline, and Daddy slams off in a fury. As Rose and Ginny and their pleased husbands prepare for a release from Daddy's overlordship, something else is released when Rose--scenting out weakness in the terrible old man--hungers for revenge at last. Nothing but Daddy's repentance will do for deeds in the past so foul that Ginny has blotted out the memory and Rose has kept her silence. Circling around Rose's sizzling path toward impossible satisfaction, with Ginny in tow, are their husbands--one blunted, one death-bound--and a self-exiled native son who will drive a wedge between the two sisters, mingling a hate and lust/love that brings one to murder. As for Daddy's angel Caroline--come back to flight for Daddy (senile? maybe), never battered by home maelstroms--he's been simply a father "no more, no less." With the Bard's peak moments--the storm, a blinding, etc.--a potent tragedy immaculate in characters, stately pace, and lowering ambiance. Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
“Brilliant. . . . Absorbing. . . . A thrilling work of art.” —Chicago Sun-Times
"It has been a long time since a novel so surprised me with its power to haunt . . . . Its genius grows from its ruthless acceptance of the divided nature of every character . . . . This gives A Thousand Acres the prismatic quality of the greatest art." --Chicago Tribune
“A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart. . . . A Thousand Acres has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Powerful and poignant.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Superb. . . . There seems to be nothing Smiley can’t write about fabulously well.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“It has been a long time since a novel so surprised me with its power to haunt. . . . A Thousand Acres [has] the prismatic quality of the greatest art.” —Chicago Tribune
“Absorbing. . . . Exhilarating. . . . An engrossing piece of fiction.” —Time
“A full, commanding novel. . . . A story bound and tethered to a lonely road in the Midwest, but drawn from a universal source. . . . Profoundly American.” —The Boston Globe