Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
(Adobe EPUB eBook, OverDrive Read)
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving's dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is the core of this collection.
The middle section of the book is fiction. Since the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968, John Irving has written twelve more novels but only half a dozen stories that he considers “finished": they are all published here, including “Interiors," which won the O. Henry Award. In the third and final section are three essays of appreciation: one on Günter Grass, two on Charles Dickens.
To each of the twelve pieces, Mr. Irving has contributed his Author's Notes. These notes provide some perspective on the circumstances surrounding the writing of each piece—for example, an election-year diary of the Bush-Clinton campaigns accompanies Mr. Irving's memoir of his dinner with President Reagan; and the notes to one of his short stories explain that the story was presented and sold to Playboy as the work of a woman.
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is both as moving and as mischievous as readers would expect from the author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer of Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year, and In One Person. And Mr. Irving's concise autobiography, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is both a work of the utmost literary accomplishment and a paradigm for living.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
John Irving. (2013). Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Arcade Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)John Irving. 2013. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Arcade Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Arcade Publishing, 2013.
MLA Citation (style guide)John Irving. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Arcade Publishing, 2013.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 1 | 1 |
OverDrive Product Record
- sortTitle
- Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- crossRefId
- 2189573
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0439-1/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0439-1/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0439-1/748/627/A2/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/6852-1/748/627/A2/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781611455465
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781611455465
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: John Irving
- id
- 748627a2-8add-409a-bc3d-9d3f4d8f5a8a
- title
- Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- starRating
- 3
- dateAdded
- 2016-06-16T18:44:00-04:00
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=2189573
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0439-1/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0439-1/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0439-1/748/627/A2/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0439-1/748/627/A2/{748627A2-8ADD-409A-BC3D-9D3F4D8F5A8A}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- formats
- fileName: TryingtoSavePiggySne_9781611455465_2189573
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 1031622
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781611455465
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 11/5/2013
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/trying-to-save-748627?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: TryingtoSavePiggySne_9781611455465_2189573
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 1031622
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781611455465
- name: OverDrive Read
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 11/5/2013
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/trying-to-save-748627?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Irving, John
- name: John Irving
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- value: Short Stories
- publishDate
- 2013-11-05T00:00:00-05:00
- publishDateText
- 11/05/2013
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving's dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is the core of this collection.
The middle section of the book is fiction. Since the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968, John Irving has written twelve more novels but only half a dozen stories that he considers “finished": they are all published here, including “Interiors," which won the O. Henry Award. In the third and final section are three essays of appreciation: one on Günter Grass, two on Charles Dickens.
To each of the twelve pieces, Mr. Irving has contributed his Author's Notes. These notes provide some perspective on the circumstances surrounding the writing of each piece—for example, an election-year diary of the Bush-Clinton campaigns accompanies...- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- fullDescription
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving's dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is the core of this collection.
The middle section of the book is fiction. Since the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968, John Irving has written twelve more novels but only half a dozen stories that he considers “finished": they are all published here, including “Interiors," which won the O. Henry Award. In the third and final section are three essays of appreciation: one on Günter Grass, two on Charles Dickens.
To each of the twelve pieces, Mr. Irving has contributed his Author's Notes. These notes provide some perspective on the circumstances surrounding the writing of each piece—for example, an election-year diary of the Bush-Clinton campaigns accompanies Mr. Irving's memoir of his dinner with President Reagan; and the notes to one of his short stories explain that the story was presented and sold to Playboy as the work of a woman.
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is both as moving and as mischievous as readers would expect from the author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer of Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year, and In One Person. And Mr. Irving's concise autobiography, “The Imaginary Girlfriend," is both a work of the utmost literary accomplishment and a paradigm for living.- sortTitle
- Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- crossRefId
- 2189573
- reviews
- premium: False
- source: The New York Times Book Review
- content: "Supple and energetic as a stylist, Mr. Irving also knows just how to create in the reader's mind a vivid impression of an existing world and just how to populate it."
- premium: False
- source: USA Today
- content: "Candid . . . Colorful . . . Those who have followed John Irving's writing career will delight in his newest, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed . . . . Readers will leave this book feeling as if they have had a terrific conversation with Irving about why he writes and how he goes about it."
- premium: False
- source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
- content: "[This] newest book is a first for Irving: a collection of memoirs, short fiction, and essays. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed features tributes to Dickens and Günter Grass, whose novels percolate with a political and moral courage Irving admires. It also includes six short stories, a form Irving doesn't claim as his own. Reminiscences round out the collection, from his caustic recollections of an awkward dinner with former President Reagan to the title piece, in which the death of his town's garbage collector symbolically sparked the teenage Irving's desire to write."
- premium: False
- source: The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer
- content: "These pieces are worth saving and savoring . . . Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is a welcome oasis on the long desert passage leading to John Irving's next novel."
- premium: False
- source: Newsday
- content: "Engagingly candid . . . The essays on himself and other writers make the book valuable, for they tell us a great deal about Irving's views of fiction, much in the public eye since the success of Garp in 1978."
- premium: False
- source: The Denver Post
- content: "A rich, wonderful and diverse look into the creative mind of one of America's most imaginative and passionate novelists . . . Irving again proves he has enough imagination for 10 writers."
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
January 29, 1996
Irving proves himself, once again, a garrulous and engaging raconteur in this collection of fiction and nonfiction divided into three sections: Memoirs, Fiction and Homage. In the last, while admiring the work of Gunter Grass, he notes that ``Grass is never so insecure as to be polite.'' Given Irving's fascination with the malfunctioning or assaulted human body, one can't help feeling that he's defending his own work--both acne (in the story, ``Brennbar's Rant'') and genital warts (the O. Henry Prize-winning ``Interior Space'') figure in these pages. Sometimes, however, Irving's grotesquerie lacks the compassion with which his favorite writer, Dickens, moderated his caricatures. In the title essay (in which Irving relates his discovery of the powers of fiction-making), Piggy Sneed, the retarded garbage collector and pig farmer whose disappearance stimulates Irving's imagination, is harshly ridiculed: Sneed ``smelled worse than any man I ever smelled--with the possible exception of a dead man I caught the scent of, once, in Istanbul.'' There are other, more engaging pieces: an amusing account of a dinner at the Reagan White House; an early, sentimental story, ``Weary Kingdom,'' about a lonely woman; and, best of all, ``The Imaginary Girlfriend,'' a rambling autobiographical sketch with a heavy emphasis on the mentors and rivals who shaped Irving's defining obsessions--wrestling and writing. Each of the 12 sections is followed by ``Author's Notes''; ``The Imaginary Girlfriend'' is supplemented with personal photographs (not seen by PW). 150,000 first printing; BOMC selection; author tour.
- popularity
- 47
- publisher
- Arcade Publishing
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/748627a2-8add-409a-bc3d-9d3f4d8f5a8a/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- 748627a2-8add-409a-bc3d-9d3f4d8f5a8a
- starRating
- 3
- bisacCodes
- code: FIC029000
- description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)
