Freddy and Fredericka
Mark Helprin
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 0143037250
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times bestseller by Mark Helprin, author of Winter's Tale, which is now a major motion picture starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connelly
Mark Helprin’s legions of devoted readers cherish his timeless novels and short stories, which are uplifting in their conviction of the goodness and resilience of the human spirit. Freddy and Fredericka—a brilliantly refashioned fairy tale and a magnificently funny farce—only seems like a radical departure of form, for behind the laughter, Helprin speaks of leaps of faith and second chances, courage and the primacy of love. Helprin’s latest work, an extraordinarily funny allegory about a most peculiar British royal family, is immensely mocking of contemporary monarchy and yet deeply sympathetic to the individuals caught in its lonely absurdities.
Now That's Funny!: Jokes and Stories from the Man Who Keeps America Laughing
Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy
Welcome to Just a Minute! A Celebration of Britain's Best-Loved Radio Comedy
not, as before, like a cup holding the light of the world. This time, they pointed downward, with the light of the world spilling out. He glanced at her for as long as he could. “I think you look very fetching in that blouse from Wal-Nut, like a natural-born queen.” “That may be so, but we’re hardly in a position to turn down a lucrative dental career.” “We’ve been here only a short time,” he said. “How do you expect two people, thrown naked from an aeroplane, to conquer the richest, most
normal. Pronounced recession from—three through B-one, and, wait. Just a minute. What’s this?” “What’s what?” Fredericka asked, peering into what had been called the widest thing in Nebraska other than the river Platte. “Look on the upper right, between one and B-two. You see that? I thought it was a wire, but he hasn’t any braces. It’s a spike, lodged in the gum.” “Let me see,” said Fredericka. “Oh my goodness it’s a nail, it’s right next to the tooth, and from the angle I would guess that
it, everyone in the hall thought he had said not whose name but Hussein. “Yes,” the moderator answered. Because Freddy was puzzled by this answer, he repeated it. “Yes?” he asked. “When?” the moderator asked. “When what?” “When did you assume your name?” Quite amazed, Freddy looked sceptically at the moderator, and perhaps amusedly, but with an edge. “When I was born,” he said, emphasising every word to ridicule such a stupid question. But the moderator and everyone else, knowing Freddy,
had inherited and learned his noted thrift (he preferred to sleep on the floor, wrapped in an aged army blanket; he happily ate rations straight from the tin; and his favourite jacket was twenty-nine years old and looked it) from both his father and his mother, but especially from his father. Paul was so thrifty that he saved used matchsticks, cut off the heads, and sent them as gifts to children with hamsters. Once, his gift to the eight-year-old grandson of Field Marshal Montgomery had been
said Kitten, “because they know, underneath, even if they don’t know that they know, that these people with whom they live in the same house and to whom they entrust their alarm codes, their cooking, and their children, would in many cases slit their throats. Hey, look, it’s better than Ecuador, but these people are not idiots. They look, they see, they adjust, they wonder, and they say, ‘Why not me?’ Wouldn’t you? That’s why a rich man’s house is never at peace. A rich man’s house is a nervous