{"product_id":"9781590171998","title":"Stoner","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDiscover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWilliam Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri  farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls  in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from  the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters  a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from  his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him;  a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper  within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts  an essential solitude.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a  work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal  American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting  by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Williams","offers":[{"title":"New York Review Books |  Paperback \/ softback | Trade paperback (US) |  2006-06-20","offer_id":48600425398527,"sku":"9781590171998","price":22.95,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0329\/9075\/7001\/files\/BNCImageAPI_22538b12-ca23-473b-8b02-b82ab3b0304c.jpg?v=1780077156","url":"https:\/\/riverbookshop.com\/products\/9781590171998","provider":"River Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}