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The Riddle of Life and Death: Tell Me a Riddle and The Death of Ivan Ilych (Paperback)
Description
Masters of short fiction illumine questions of pain, suffering, medicine, fate, and, most starkly, “Why am I dying?” Circling in psychological time, Tillie Olsen depicts the death of a working-class grandmother, a past proletarian revolutionary in Russia, and how her death devastates her family in mid-twentieth-century America. Leo Tolstoy’s cancer-ravaged Czarist bureaucrat weighs his life, searching for semblances of meaning in a linear, realistic story.
About the Author
Activist and author Tillie Olsen is best known for her prize-winning fiction Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio: From the Thirties. She has taught at MIT, Stanford, and Amherst. Olsen is an recipient of an Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a social reformer, pacifist, Christian anarchist, and vegetarian in his naive Russia. His masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, represent what is considered the peak of realistic fiction.


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