Everything is Nice: Collected Stories, Fragments and Plays - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908745150 ISBN 13: 9781908745156

Publisher: Imprint unknown, 1705

Synopsis

Jane Bowles wrote very little: just one perfect novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and the dozen or so stories collected in this volume. But it was enough to establish a reputation as one of the twentieth century's most original fiction writers. From the title story where an American woman is led to a house in a 'blue moslem town' by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to Camp Cataract, a Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, Everything is Nice takes you into an edgy and exhilarating, tragicomic world. This beautifully produced volume includes all of Jane Bowles's stories, together with the fragments of two further novels, and three stories that originally formed a part of Two Serious Ladies, before the book was edited by Paul Bowles. The book also includes the full text of In the Summer House, and two other short plays, A Quarelling Pair and At the Jumping Bean. Together with Two Serious Ladies, it represents Jane Bowles's complete fictional output.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Bowles (born Jane Auer, 1917) 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. They were nonetheless devoted companions, living in Tangier, Morocco, in adjoining apartments. At the age of 40, Jane Bowles suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.

Review:

Readers who've not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who've still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come. -- Ali Smith No other writer can consistently produce surprise of this quality, the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art. Jane Bowles deals almost exclusively in this rare commodity -- John Ashberry

About this edition

• Publisher: Imprint unknown
• Publication date: 1705
• ISBN 10: 1908745150
• ISBN 13: 9781908745156
• Binding: Paperback