1971, ISBN: 0811202852

Hardcover, First edition

[EAN: 9780811202855], [PU: New Directions Books, NY], COLLECTIBLE LITERATURE FIRST EDITIONS, First edition. xii, 276pp. Red cloth, gilt spine lettering and design, cream endpapers. Dust j… More...

[EAN: 9780811202855], [PU: New Directions Books, NY], COLLECTIBLE LITERATURE FIRST EDITIONS, First edition. xii, 276pp. Red cloth, gilt spine lettering and design, cream endpapers. Dust jacket price 6.95. SIGNED BY AUTHOR to first blank page. Book is tight and appears unread, without blemishes. Dust jacket is very bright and without the typical age-toning and fading; there is a 1 inch closed tear and three minor creases to top edge front panel. Scarce book to obtain signed. 'John Hawkes is an American Master' - Donald Barthelme. John Hawkes was."One of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American letters through our century's second half, a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course.He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a 'Passion Artist': for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterly prose stylists. Hawkes's books number nearly a score, from ''The Cannibal'' in 1949 through ''An Irish Eye'' in 1997. Mostly novels, all of modest heft, plus a scarifying story-and-novella collection and a volume of short plays, they have in common a preoccupation with the horrific, suffused with the erotic and redeemed by the comic. One sees affinities with Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor; to mention such affinities, however, is to be reminded of Hawkes's difference from those compatriots, all of whom he admired. Like theirs, his fiction is in the American Gothic grain, but his material is more cosmopolitan -- closer in this respect to that of his bookshelf neighbor Hawthorne, or to Poe. A Hawkes novel may be set in England, Germany, Maine, Alaska, the Caribbean, ''Illyria'' or some Transylvania of the soul; literal places are less important to him than the geographies of passion and language. His imagination, like Kafka's, is powerfully metaphorical. And dark. And comic. Hawkes's fiction has been widely admired from the start by literary critics and his fellow writers: his book jackets are garlanded with enthusiastic testimonials from the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Donald Barthelme. But his standing, alas, has ever surpassed his following, and that's a pity, for he's no more for connoisseurs only than is an excellent wine. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, a fine first taste is ''Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader,'' a self-assembled degustation with autobiographical notes by the author and a beautiful introduction by William H. Gass. But really one can begin anywhere: the voice is all of a piece." - John Barth. "Two couples mingle their loves in an 'Illyria' that brings to mind the timeless countryside of Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'. Yet no synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power." - front dust jacket flap. This is the first novel in the traid [the others are 'Death, Sleep and the Traveler' and 'Travesty'] of novels concerned with sex, myth, the imagination, and the absurd.<

1971, ISBN: 0811202852

Hardcover, First edition

[EAN: 9780811202855], [PU: New Directions Books, NY], COLLECTIBLE LITERATURE FIRST EDITIONS, First edition. xii, 276pp. Red cloth, gilt spine lettering and design, cream endpapers. Dust j… More...

[EAN: 9780811202855], [PU: New Directions Books, NY], COLLECTIBLE LITERATURE FIRST EDITIONS, First edition. xii, 276pp. Red cloth, gilt spine lettering and design, cream endpapers. Dust jacket price 6.95. SIGNED BY AUTHOR to first blank page. Book is tight and appears unread, without blemishes. Dust jacket is very bright and without the typical age-toning and fading; there is a 1 inch closed tear and three minor creases to top edge front panel. Scarce book to obtain signed. 'John Hawkes is an American Master' - Donald Barthelme. John Hawkes was."One of the steadily brightest (and paradoxically darkest) lights of American letters through our century's second half, a navigation star for scores of apprentice writers however different their own literary course.He was, to echo another of his titles, truly a 'Passion Artist': for five decades one of our most original literary imaginations and masterly prose stylists. Hawkes's books number nearly a score, from ''The Cannibal'' in 1949 through ''An Irish Eye'' in 1997. Mostly novels, all of modest heft, plus a scarifying story-and-novella collection and a volume of short plays, they have in common a preoccupation with the horrific, suffused with the erotic and redeemed by the comic. One sees affinities with Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor; to mention such affinities, however, is to be reminded of Hawkes's difference from those compatriots, all of whom he admired. Like theirs, his fiction is in the American Gothic grain, but his material is more cosmopolitan -- closer in this respect to that of his bookshelf neighbor Hawthorne, or to Poe. A Hawkes novel may be set in England, Germany, Maine, Alaska, the Caribbean, ''Illyria'' or some Transylvania of the soul; literal places are less important to him than the geographies of passion and language. His imagination, like Kafka's, is powerfully metaphorical. And dark. And comic. Hawkes's fiction has been widely admired from the start by literary critics and his fellow writers: his book jackets are garlanded with enthusiastic testimonials from the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Donald Barthelme. But his standing, alas, has ever surpassed his following, and that's a pity, for he's no more for connoisseurs only than is an excellent wine. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, a fine first taste is ''Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader,'' a self-assembled degustation with autobiographical notes by the author and a beautiful introduction by William H. Gass. But really one can begin anywhere: the voice is all of a piece." - John Barth. "Two couples mingle their loves in an 'Illyria' that brings to mind the timeless countryside of Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'. Yet no synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power." - front dust jacket flap. This is the first novel in the traid [the others are 'Death, Sleep and the Traveler' and 'Travesty'] of novels concerned with sex, myth, the imagination, and the absurd.<

1971, ISBN: 0811202852

Hardcover

[EAN: 9780811202855], [PU: NY New Directions 1971.], MODERN FIRST EDT., Jacket, Dj has few small stains to covers, o/w fine copy. First edition.