Plain Pleasures - by Jane Bowles (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters . . . Her work, her life: deep truth, observed without pretension, with humor and humanity. As artist and person, an angel." --Tennessee Williams

In these uncanny and insidious tales, Jane Bowles presents an incendiary and groundbreaking vision of the mad possibilities of literary modernism. From "Everything Is Nice," 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 tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread set in Colorado, these stories are a bewildering, headlong plunge into the jagged, fever-dream world of Jane Bowles. And for the first time ever, this collection includes the excised sections of Bowles's novel Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies).

Review Quotes

"What distinguishes Bowles's work--what animates those strange, angular sentences, with their unexpected rhythms and turns of phrase and rabid energy--isn't its interest in nonconformity but its obsession with spiritual transformation." --Nicole Flattery, Harper's Magazine

About the Author

Jane Bowles wrote only one novel, a play, and just over a dozen short stories. But these were enough to establish her reputation as one of the twentieth century's most original fiction writers. Born in New York City in 1917, she later married the author Paul Bowles. At the age of forty, she suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.