Jane Turner Rylands is the author of the collection Venetian Stories and has lived in Venice for more than three decades. She is married to Philip Rylands, the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
“A welcome spin on such a famous and well-documented setting....Wonderful.... Rylands's crisscrossing of narratives, characters and references is dense enough to give her book the feel of a loosely jointed novel.” —The New York Times Book Review“A witty and gratifying literary tour.... Rylands creates characters as memorable as the sights of Venice itself.” —MoreRylands’s stories are like a teaspoon of grated Parmesan washed down a swallow of hearty red wine. They’re a discreet indulgence.”—Salon
In each of these 12 stories, Rylands, an American who has lived in Venice for over three decades, continues in much the same vein as she did in Venetian Stories, mining Venetian society for its secrets. She portrays the contemporary Venice of laptops and cell phones juxtaposed against a backdrop of canals and historic palaces. In "Restoration," she details the restoration of a home, the end of a marriage, and the death of an heir; "Mobility" deals with hubris and the eventual fall of a racecar driver; "Art" reveals the sly machinations of art dealers. "Probability" shows, in its liveliest part, how petty public servants ingeniously manipulate Venetian bureaucracy to their advantage. Many of the stories in this second collection are interlinked, and all are simultaneously ironic and sympathetic in their view of the Venetian scene. Machiavellian characters and the wicked humor of Rylands's prose make this a suitable purchase for academic libraries and those public libraries where Venetian Stories enjoyed popularity.-Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"A welcome spin on such a famous and well-documented setting....Wonderful.... Rylands's crisscrossing of narratives, characters and references is dense enough to give her book the feel of a loosely jointed novel." -The New York Times Book Review"A witty and gratifying literary tour.... Rylands creates characters as memorable as the sights of Venice itself." -MoreRylands's stories are like a teaspoon of grated Parmesan washed down a swallow of hearty red wine. They're a discreet indulgence."-Salon
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