From AudioFile
This recording is a complete and utter success if for no other reason than it makes you almost (almost) forget about Meryl Streep's tragic performance in the film version. It follows, then, that the person responsible for this success is narrator William Hope. He does a masterful job acting, not merely reading, Styron's extraordinary novel. Hope's portrayal of the trio of characters is true and explicit--Southern Stingo, Brooklynite Nathan, and Polish Sophie. Hope's voice embraces these people and destroys their facades to expose all the emotion, pathos, and humanity they can exude. He also transitions from one character to the next flawlessly, using almost perfect diction and pacing. It is entirely possible to hear every word in the book. That's how clear he is. R.I.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Book Description
Sophie?s Choice is one of William Styron?s crowning achievements, displaying his ability to weave a fictitious novel from meticulous research. The novel is a riveting story of Holocaust survivors burdened with the responsibility of bearing witness. Examine this work through some of the best critical essays on the text. The title, William Styron’s Sophie's Choice, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on William Styron’s Sophie's Choice through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on William Styron, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.


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One of the two or three finest novels about the Holocaust, Sophie's Choice encapsulates through Sophie's anguished story the sweep and brutality of history. The basis for a famed and honored movie with Meryl Streep (Academy Award Winner), the novel has ga

ANNOTATION

In this ambitious bestseller (made into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep), Styron tells of a young Southerner who wants to become a writer; of the turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in the woman's past, one that impels Sophie toward destruction. Reissue.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

First published in 1979, this novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp ... and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.

SYNOPSIS