William 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. John 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.

"Augustus" tells the story of Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen who, on the death of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of the Roman Empire. He is destined to rule that world astonishingly well, given the odds and intrigues against him. He would later be known as Augustus Caesar (63 B. C. - 14A. D.), the first Roman emperor. Through the use of fictional letters, memoranda and dispatches, we see how Augustus established his essential base of power and how he was continually obliged to put down, by a subtle combination of force and guile, the challenges of such men as Cicero, Brutus, Cassius and, finally, Mark Antony. The narrative mosaic John Williams has built on impeccable historical research brings Augustus vividly to life. Williams invests his characters with such profound humanity and treats them with such terrible honesty and compassion that we enter into their very lives and times.

In his National Book Award winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

The son of a Midwestern farmer, William Stoner comes to the University of Missouri in 1910 to study agriculture. He had intended to return home and take over his father's farm - but instead, inspired by the professor of English literature, he remains at the university to teach. Stoner tells of love and conflict, passion and responsibility against the backdrop of academic life in the early 20th century. Powerfully and movingly written, Stoner is a study of a dedicated man relentlessly committed to honesty in himself and in his dealings with others. The truth of one man's unassuming life can rarely have been captured with such skill and beauty.

In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher’s Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master.

In his National Book Award-winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, and#64257;red up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. "Butcher's Crossing "is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to and#64257;nd a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

William 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.
John 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.

First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist—a career that would go on to include the classics Stoner and the National Book Award winning Augustus. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years. With rare economy and clarity, the story moves at an ever-increasing pace to its unforgettable end.

Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur's fear and aversion to the man is powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful young woman. But as the memories of childhood trauma surface and disorientate, Arthur's night out rises towards the pitch of disaster.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1115642/nothing-but-the-night/

本书系列的主题音乐现在用钢琴演奏谱的方式收集在这里。这些钢琴曲将人们心中的小英雄哈利·波特和霍格沃茨魔法学校的伙伴们与邪恶黑暗势力作斗争的奇妙场景召唤到日常生活中，再现约翰·威廉姆斯精妙绝伦的神奇魔幻音乐。欢迎再次来到霍格沃茨魔法学校，感受小魔法师亲历的种种奇遇，领略《哈利·波特》的巨大冲击力，抓紧你的扫把，拿好你的魔杖，别被这么帅的音乐电翻了哦。

《只有黑夜》是《史托納》、《屠夫渡口》、《奧古斯都》作者、1973年美國國家圖書獎得主約翰・威廉斯二十六歲出版的第一本創作小說。這本書揭開了約翰・威廉斯終其一生處理「個人力量」和「命運偶然」間摩擦侵蝕的偉大寫作生涯。
亞瑟是一個神經敏感且對生命感到虛無的年輕男子。某天他收到久違未見的父親的來信。亞瑟對父親有著強烈的恐懼和厭惡，然而卻無法抑制與他見面的衝動。在他們會面之後，已是夜晚，亞瑟失魂地進到夜總會，他與一位年輕美麗的女子相遇，兩人喝著過量的酒、自然而然變得親密，但隨著他童年創傷的記憶浮現、勾起種種畫面。亞瑟的夜晚走向一場災難。
首次出版於1948年，《只有黑夜》是約翰・威廉斯的首部作品，彷彿希臘式無可避免的悲劇。故事以主角生命中最重要的一天為時間軸，藉以訴說他童年曾目睹的暴力和創傷，成了他日復一日的惡夢，唯有黑夜是他的庇護。
「他忽然間相信，任何他有生之年發生在他身上的事，都不能怪罪於他，因為他沒有行動過，他從來沒有做過出於自願的行動。某些莫名的力量推著他從一個地方到另一地方、推著他走一條他不想走的路、推著他進入連他都不想知道的不知名的地方。一切都是黑暗、都是無名，他走在黑暗裡。」