num_pages: 256
description: Selected by The Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the Ten Best Fiction Books of 2003. The Noonday Cemetery &amp; Other Stories , selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel The Island was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir, A World Apart , is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag. Volcano and Miracle , published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his Journal Written at Night . But nowhere before have Herling's best stories―and Herling was indeed a master of the short story―been compiled and published in English translation.In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer.These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by The Boston Globe that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."
language: English
title: The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories
titlecomplete: The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories
genres: Literature, Polish Literature, Short Stories
ratings_count: 14
publisher: New Directions