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A rich companion to the first volume of David Plante's ...)
A rich companion to the first volume of David Plante's memoir, Becoming a Londoner, Worlds Apart explores worlds of experience drawn from the millions of words Plante has put to the page in his diaries over the last fifty years. This new volume doesn't follow sequentially from the first--rather it can be read on its own or as an overlay, building and expanding on the relationships and experiences recalled in Becoming a Londoner. Plante widens the scope of this second volume, recounting his adventures in France, Italy, Greece, Russia, Israel, New York, even Oklahoma. Fragments of diaries, notes, sketches, and drawings deepen and enrich the "characters" we met in the first volume, including Nikos, his longtime partner, and luminaries such as Philip Roth and E.M. Forster.
Plante is never without a school notebook and a ballpoint pen. He writes everywhere, updating his diary in the waiting areas of train stations or airplane terminals, and on long trips without interruptions. He spends hours in cafes, especially one in Lucca called Di Simo, and at home, in his study, where he is amazed that he starts an entry in full sunlight and puts his pen down at night, hardly aware that he'd needed to switch on a desk lamp to continue. It is this lifelong devotion to his diary that endows us with decades of stories about the artistic elite. Both a deeply personal memoir and a fascinating and significant work of cultural history, Worlds Apart is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.
(A very good hardcover copy with silver spine lettering. L...)
A very good hardcover copy with silver spine lettering. Letters on front endpaper and inside front cover. Tight binding. Clean, unmarked pages. Very good jacket in removable mylar; some chipping with a bit of fading and rubbing. NOT ex-library. 247pg. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Fiction; Inventory No: 018405.
Plante, David Robert was born on March 4, 1940 in Providence. Son of Anaclet Joseph Adolph Plante and Albina Marie Bisson.
Education
Bachelor in French, Boston College, 1961.
Career
He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Among his honours are: Henfield Fellow, University of East Anglia, 1975.
British Arts Council Grant, 1977. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983.
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1983. He is an Ambassador for the LGBT Committee of the New York Public Library.
His voluminous diary is kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
His papers are kept in the library of The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a retired professor of creative writing at Columbia University. His novels examine the spiritual in a variety of contexts, but notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background.
His male characters range from openly gay to sexually ambiguous and questioning.
He has been a writer-in-residence at Gorki Institute of Literature (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King"s College, the University of Cambridge, the University of Tulsa, and the University of East Anglia. Plante lives in London, Lucca Italy, and Athens Greece.