书名：The Poisonwood Bible 毒木圣经
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数960
作者：Barbara Kingsolver
出版社名称：Harper Perennial Modern Classics
出版时间：2005
语种：英文
ISBN：9780060786502
商品尺寸：13.3 x 2.1 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：546

The Poisonwood Bible《毒木圣经》是芭芭拉·金索尔弗在1998年发表的小说，是作者颇具影响力和代表性的作品之一，美国《纽约时报》畅销书。这部小说曾获得南非的国家图书奖，以及普利策奖和福克纳小说奖提名，并在当年被美国《时代》杂志、《洛杉矶时报》和《乡村之声》联名评选为年度zui佳小说。本书适合英语专业、文学研究者、社会学者以及对英美文化感兴趣的朋友品鉴阅读。
推荐理由：
1.The Poisonwood Bible《毒木圣经》入选欧普拉读书俱乐部，至今仍被津津乐道的畅销神话；
2.希拉里·克林顿选读之书，书中描写了女性、黑人及自然在那样的年代及环境下所面临的独有的挑战与抉择；
3.本书作者芭芭拉·金索佛是美国当代女性作家，其独特的视角，广博的自然知识，温暖的笔触和丰美的意象，有助于学生了解美国当代文学；
4.后附作者简介、本书介绍等，方便读者了解作者背景以及她创作这本书的心路历程。

The Poisonwood Biblewas selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999. Additionally that year, the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It won the 2000 Boeke Prize. Writing inThe New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the book “powerful”, but said the social allegories were at times “heavy-handed”. John Mullan, reviewing the book in British newspaperThe Guardian, said the book was “remarkable not just for its story but also for its narrative form.”
Media Reviews:
“Compelling, lyrical, and utterly believable.” —Chicago Tribune
“There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver’sThe Poisonwood Bible. ... This awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin.”            —Jane Smiley, Washington Post Book World 
“Fully realized, richly embroidered, and triumphant.” —Newsweek
“Powerful. … Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.” —Time

The Poisonwood Bible《毒木圣经》描绘的是19世纪50年代的比属刚果。在那刚果人民争取独立的连天烽火之下，美国白人浸信会牧师纳森·普莱斯（Nathan Price）带着妻子和四个女儿来到这荒莽之地，因为他认为这里满是需要救赎的灵魂。这本近六百页的史诗以二十世纪颇具戏剧化的政治动荡为背景，由普莱斯家族的五位女性轮番担任叙事者，写她们在父权的威迫、复杂陌生的异国文化、危机四伏的内战下交织而成的故事，残酷、美丽、凄切，震撼人心，是金索佛生涯颇具野心的创作。

The Poisonwood Bibleis a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

芭芭拉·金索尔弗（Barbara Kingsolver, 1955—）是20世纪80年代开始崛起的美国当代作家，迄今为止出版了六部长篇小说、一部短篇小说集、两部散文集、一部诗集和三部非小说作品。她的创作生涯可谓是一路顺风顺水，从小说《豆树青青》首战告捷以来，其他五部小说也是喜讯不断。凭借小说《空隙》荣获英国”橘子文学奖”。

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American novelist, essayist and poet. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works includeThe Poisonwood Bible,the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, andAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle,a non-fiction account of her family’s attempts to eat locally.
Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. Each of her books published since 1993 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011, UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna, and the National Humanities Medal. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

           Author’s Note
Book One  GENESIS
Book Two  THE REVELATION
Book Three  THE JUDGES
Book Four   BEL AND THE SERPENT
Book Five  EXODUS
Book Six   SONG OF THE THREE CHILDREN
Book Seven  THE EYES IN THE TREES
Bibliography
     作者注
卷一 起源
卷二 启示
卷三 判断
卷四 贝尔与蛇
卷五 出埃及记
卷六 三童歌
卷七 树上的眼睛
参考书目

IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. The mother especially—watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way. The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. Even now they resist affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes—the one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious—flanked by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp. But gamely enough they climb together over logs of rank decay that have fallen across the path. The mother waves a graceful hand in front of her as she leads the way, parting curtain after curtain of spiders’ webs. She appears to be conducting a symphony. Behind them the curtain closes. The spiders return to their killing ways.