Κλειδάριθμος Χλωμό Άλογο, Χλωμός Αναβάτης

Katherine Anne Porter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a National Book Award and a Gold Medal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, while she was a 5-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider was first published in 1939 and includes three outstanding novellas – Mortal Life, Midday Wine, and the story of the same title. Mortal Life is a coming-of-age story set in the period 1885-1902. It revolves around the delusions and idealizations of the family of Miranda, a young girl. An ethnography of the time that highlights the position of the woman, who manages through romantic but distorted perceptions to find her own distinct, illusion-free, identity. The second novella, Noon Wine, has been described as an "ancient Greek tragedy set in late 19th and early 20th century Texas." The plot unfolds on a small family farm and demonstrates how the accumulation of trivial mistakes of the past can result with mathematical certainty in a terrible present. In the eponymous novella, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," we find Miranda again, a reporter for a small Denver newspaper. It's 1918, and the planet is in the midst of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The chillingly timely descriptions of the pandemic through the eyes of two young people in love are masterfully interwoven with those about war, its meaning and its traumatic effects on people's lives. The three novellas, already 82 years old, prove the tragic timelessness of literature when it deals so masterfully with the human condition, offering, if not consolation, at least the universal sense of belonging. They said of the book: "Katherine Anne Porter belongs in illustrious company with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry James." ‒Saturday Review “Ms. Porter has managed to strike an emotional chord that few, if any, of her contemporaries have even managed to approach. Her reputation was established neither by luck nor by magic tricks, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider attests to that." –The New York Times Katherine Ann Porter (1890-1980) belongs to the pantheon of the most important writers of the 20th century. Although her only novel, Ship of Fools (1962), was widely and critically acclaimed as a huge literary and commercial success, Porter became known, admired and loved primarily for her short stories and novellas. "Many of her short stories are unsurpassed in modern literature." –Kenyon Review. Porter was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize (1965) and the National Book Award (1966) for her short story collection The Collected Stories, which includes Flowering Judas and Other Stories and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.