Janet Frame

The Edge of the Alphabet is a novel written by Janet Frame. The story follows the life of a young woman named Alice who is struggling to find her place in the world. Alice has always felt like an outsider, and she is constantly searching for something to fill the void in her life. As she navigates through her early adulthood, Alice meets a variety of characters who help shape her perspective on life. She falls in love with a man named Gordon, but their relationship is complicated by his own struggles with mental illness. Throughout the book, Alice grapples with questions of identity, purpose, and belonging. She explores her own creativity through writing, and she begins to find a sense of purpose in her work. The Edge of the Alphabet is a poignant and thought-provoking novel that explores the complexities of human relationships and the search for meaning in life. Janet Frame's writing is both lyrical and insightful, and her characters are richly drawn and deeply human. This book is a must-read for anyone who is looking for a thoughtful and engaging story about the human experience. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

'Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural' JANE CAMPION, GUARDIAN'The idea of a new novel by Janet Frame is in itself a delight' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 'She is a singular writer. No one is quite like her' ELEANOR CATTON The Daylight and the Dust is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many of her best stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection The Lagoon and Other Stories, first published in 1952, right up to the volume You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, published in the 1980s. This new selection also includes five works that have not been collected before. Her themes range from childhood to old age to death and beyond. Within the pages of one book the reader is transported from small town New Zealand to inner-city London, and from realism to fantasy. Janet Frame's versatility dazzles.

The acclaimed autobiography of one of New Zealand's best-loved writers. Introduced by Jane Campion, who made it into a prize-winning film.

'All I had experienced, all the stories I had read or dreamed came to me the moment I, a stranger, turned the key in the lock of the unknown house.'In a sweltering basement in downtown Baltimore, Mavis Halleton, writer, ventriloquist and gossip, is struggling to write her novel when an unexpected invitation arrives. The Garretts, a couple Mavis has never heard of but who admire her work, are to spend time in Italy and offer the use of their airy home in the Berkeley hills. During her stay, an earthquake hits northern Italy and Mavis, to her surprise, inherits the house. But, surrounded by museum replicas and tasteful imitations, she finds reality itself is on shaky ground. In this highly inventive novel, reality, fiction and dreams are woven together as Janet Frame playfully explores the process of writing fiction.

This is a novel of exile and return which Janet Frame felt too autobiographical to be published in her lifetime. It is an exquisite work shot through with tenderness and Frame's characteristic self-deprecating humour.

Narrated entirely from the viewpoint of a young insane woman, this novel provides a moving description of the horrific conditions in two New Zealand mental institutions.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand." Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".

Beneath the seemingly tranquil surface of an old English village lie murder, incest, and mystery. Alwyn Maude, a handsome young man, commits a senseless murder - a horrifying fact that somehow seems quintessentially modern. Alwyn is contrasted against his antiquated father and uncle, revealing the tensions between past and present and the shortcomings of both.

This collection of stories - Janet Frame's first published book - appeared in New Zealand in 1951, while she was confined in a mental hospital. It won the Hubert Church Award, and a threatened brain operation was averted. These stories bring into focus a crucial turning point in her life.

Recipient of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, Janet Frame has long been admired for her startlingly original prose and formidable imagination. A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.