Jane Bowles

Broschiertes Buch

Two Serious Ladies

Beschreibung

2020 Reprint of the 1943 Edition. The only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles, the highly influential wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies is a modernist cult classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two respectable women as they descend into debauchery. Christina Goering, eccentric and adventurous, and Frieda Copperfield, anxious but enterprising, are two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves. Old friends, each will take a surprising path in search of salvation: during a visit to Panama, Mrs. Copperfield abandons her husband, finding solace in a relationship with a teenage prostitute; while Miss Goering, a wealthy spinster, pursues sainthood via sordid encounters with the basest of men. At the end the two women meet again, each radically altered by her experience.

Autor

Jane Bowles (born Jane Auer, 1917-1973) - a daring and stylish modernist - has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. The author of a novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and a volume of stories, Plain Pleasures. Her genius for spare prose and vivid dialogue had an outsized influence on her contemporaries. Tennessee Williams called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters"; Truman Capote said she was a "modern legend"; and for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Auer grew up in New York City, where as a teenager she became part of a bohemian, bisexual scene, along with the writer Paul Bowles. The pair married in 1938, somewhat impulsively, as both primarily pursued same-sex relationships (when she met Bowles, she told a friend, "He's my enemy"). Jane Bowles belonged to the New York artistic circles of the 1940s before moving with Paul to Paris and Tangier, where she knew Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Though her body of work was relatively small, Bowles has enjoyed a large literary influence, with Edmund White writing that "the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have." Besides her literary output, Bowles's letters-to Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowles, and about John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Alice Toklas, Gore Vidal, and Eudora Welty, among others-are by turns candid and heartbreaking, both serious and seriously funny. At the age of 40, Jane suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Martino Fine Books
• Seitenzahl: 204
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 339g
• ISBN-13: 9781684224753
• ISBN-10: 1684224756
• Artikelnr.: 59788815