Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

Overview

"Elegantly contemplative.…[O]ffers a powerfully human sense of the struggle it takes for new ideas to dislodge old ones." —Janet Maslin, New York Times Book Review
Dramas both personal and cosmic unfold around five pivotal moments in the history of knowledge in this collection from the "genius enchantress" (Karen Russell) author of Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award.

A young boy comes of age amid an explosion of homespun investigations. A widowed science writer tries to reconcile the influence of emotion on scientific theory. A famous biologist finds himself outpaced by his students, even as he seeks to teach them. As the characters in this "elegant, thought-provoking" (Connie Ogle, Miami Herald) collection witness the world transform around them through groundbreaking discoveries—the flight of an early aeroplane, Darwin's theory of evolution, developments in genetics and X-ray technology—they grapple with the thrill and loss that accompanies scientific progress, and the personal passions and impersonal politics that shape all human knowledge. Throughout these deftly plotted stories, Andrea Barrett weaves subtle connections among the tales within this collection and characters in her earlier works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393240504
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	257
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Andrea Barrett is the author of the National Book Award–winning Ship Fever, Voyage of the Narwhal, Servants of the Map, Natural History, and other works of fiction. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an NEA Fellowship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in the Adirondacks.

Hometown:

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 16, 1954

Place of Birth:

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Union College

Website:

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/004348.htm

Editorial Reviews

…elegantly contemplative…The best of the five stories in Archangel recall the power and mystery of Ms. Barrett's Ship Fever, another collection of exceptional delicacy and grace…Her stories work as both fiction and as philosophy of science. And she need do no grandstanding to advance her belief in unstoppable progress. But this book does offer a powerfully human sense of the struggle it takes for new ideas to dislodge old ones.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

"Elegantly contemplative…. A book full of strong women. . . . Recall[s] the power and mystery of Ms. Barrett’s Ship Fever, another collection of exceptional delicacy and grace."

New York Times

"An evocative, sepia-toned beauty…. Lovely, lambent prose, balanced and graceful."

Michael Lindgren

"Starred review. Barrett’s consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable."

Booklist

"An elegant new story collection… Barrett frequently telescopes out of human frailty to an almost cosmic realm."

Boston Globe - John Freeman

"Pulls us relentlessly away from false comforts, into the dazzling, often chaotic, world as it really is."

New York Review of Books - April Bernard

"At last! It's finally here: the astonishing new collection from that genius-enchantress, Andrea Barrett. Who but Barrett can take on the inscrutable elegance of the cosmos and the messy complexity of the human heart in a single story? In her joy-to-read prose, with scientific precision and warm insight, Barrett translates the unknown into our world of reference. Her characters' thirst for discovery is contagious, and every story in Archangel is suffused with the most miraculous horizon light."

Karen Russell

"Barrett’s consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable."

Booklist, Starred Review - Donna Seaman

"Does anyone write with a calmer authority than Andrea Barrett? …Archangel… ranks right up there with her National Book Award-winning Ship Fever."

Chicago Tribune - Lloyd Sachs

"Stories that shiver with an awe . . . realizations occur that can only be called sublime, everything preceding them consisting of the mundane stuff of the world transformed by the alchemy of story."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

The award-winning author returns with another collection of stories distinguished by uncommon scope and depth. Having won the National Book Award with Ship Fever (1996), Barrett has continued to command fictional territory all her own. Her latest collection of five stories finds her fiction typically steeped in science, rich in ideas, set in the historical past, and filled with characters who share the excitement, and some of the fear, of discovery. Framing the collection are two stories featuring the same protagonist, Constantine Boyd, as a boy of 12 from Detroit in "The Investigators," set in 1908, and as a soldier amid the madness of war in the concluding title story, set in 1919 Russia. The first story is a masterwork of misdirection, as the boy investigates a world rife with discovery--of evolution, flight, family, identity, self (away from home, he flirts with calling himself "Stan")--while the reader discovers the underlying story of the protagonist's home life, the reasons why the boy spends summers with one uncle or another. Other stories delve deeply into the debates initially surrounding evolution, the popular but subsequently discarded notion of ether, and the darker implications of genetics (with the rise of Nazi Germany as a backdrop). Yet the characters are never secondary to (or mere mouthpieces for) the provocative ideas, as the stories explore relationships among mentors and students, scientific rivals, romantic attractions. She writes not only of someone "who still appreciates the poet's wonderment in these days at the marvels of science," but as someone who can recapture that wonderment decades after such marvels have been embraced or refuted. And she recognizes throughout the collection "how the theories seized on with such enthusiasm by one generation might be discarded scornfully by the next." Barrett's stories rank with the best.

Kirkus Reviews