Skip to product information
1 of 1

Stoner

Stoner

by John Williams, introduction by John McGahern

Regular price $16.95
Regular price Sale price $16.95
Format

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.John Williams, introduction by John McGahern

Download the Reading Group Guide for Stoner.

John Williams

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590171998
Pages: 304
Publication Date:

Praise

The book begins boldly with a mention of Stoner's death, and a nod to his profound averageness: 'Few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.' By the end, though, Williams has made Stoner's disappointing life into such a deep and honest portrait, so unsoftened and unromanticized, that it's quietly breathtaking.
The Boston Globe

Williams' descriptions of the experience of reading both elucidate and evince the pleasures of literary language; the 'minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words' in which Stoner finds joy are re-enacted in Williams' own perfect fusion of words.
n+1

Stoner, by John Williams, is a slim novel, and not a particularly joyous one. But it is so quietly beautiful and moving, so precisely constructed, that you want to read it in one sitting and enjoy being in it, altered somehow, as if you have been allowed to wear an exquisitely tailored garment that you don't want to take off.
The Globe and Mail

It is a marvelous discovery for everyone who loves literature.
—Ian McEwan, BBC Radio 4

One of the great forgotten novels of the past century. I have bought at least 50 copies of it in the past few years, using it as a gift for friends....The book is so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic.
—Colum McCann's Top 10 Novels, The Guardian

Stoner is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn't a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-Gatsby....Part of Stoner's greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair....The novel embodies the very virtues it exalts, the same virtues that probably relegate it, like its titular hero, to its perpetual place in the shade. But the book, like professor William Stoner, isn't out to win popularity contests. It endures, illumined from within.
—Tim Krieder, The New Yorker

It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it's one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across.
—Tom Hanks, Time Magazine

Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles....Its hero is an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies. Yet the novel is utterly riveting, and for one simple reason: because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honesty that we cannot help but love them.
—Steve Almond, Tin House

John Williams's Stoner is something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away.
—Morris Dickstein,The New York Times Book Review

Williams didn't write much compared with some novelists, but everything he did was exceedingly fine...it's a shame that he's not more often read today...But it's great that at least two of his novels [Stoner, Butcher's Crossing] have found their way back into print.
The Denver Post

A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man
The New Yorker

Stoner by John Williams, contains what is no doubt my favorite literary romance of all time. William Stoner is well into his 40s, and mired in an unhappy marriage, when he meets Katherine, another shy professor of literature. The affair that ensues is described with a beauty so fierce that it takes my breath away each time I read it. The chapters devoted to this romance are both terribly sexy and profoundly wise.
The Christian Science Monitor

This reprint of Williams's remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose.
Publishers Weekly

I’m not a big rereader, but I just reread Stoner by John Williams, and marveled once again at its remarkable combination of omniscience and intimacy.
—Jess Walter

My favorite book ever is this book by John Williams…. I want more people to read this…. It had me thinking about my life more than any other book has. I was like, I just don’t want to get to the end.
—Booksaresick, TikTok

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it