Jane Bowles has for many years had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. The collection in My Sister's Hand in Mine of expertly crafted short fiction will fully acquaint all students and scholars with the author Tennessee Williams called "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters."

'My favourite book. I can't think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic' Tennessee Williams 'The book I give as a gift . . . It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit' Sheila Heti 'A modern legend . . . A very funny writer' Truman Capote 'Profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true' Claire Messud I am going on a trip. Wait until I tell you about it. it's terrible. Miss Goering, an eccentric, impulsive New York heiress, resides in her house and tries not to be unhappy. Mrs Copperfield, an anxious, dutiful married woman, has a great fear of drowning, of lifts, of intruders in the night. Two serious ladies, nothing is natural for them and anything is possible. For Mrs Copperfield - a trip to Panama, where she abandons her husband for love of a local prostitute. For Miss Goering - a move to a squalid little house on an island and a series of sordid encounters with strangers. Both go to pieces -and both realise this is something they've wanted to do for years. With an introduction by Naoise Dolan A W&N Essential

For her centenary (February 22, 2017), the most complete edition ever published of the brilliant modernist writings and evocative letters of an LGBT pioneer. Though Jane Bowles published only one novel, one play, and a handful of stories, 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"; for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Now, on the occasion of her centenary, Library of America presents the most complete edition ever published of Bowles's incomparable fiction, along with an extensive selection of her frank, vivid, and funny letters. Two Serious Ladies (1943), based partly on her honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, follows two bourgeois American women in Panama as they jettison sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness: Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster who becomes a high-class prostitute; and newlywed Frieda Copperfield, who finds love and comfort in the arms of a young Panamanian girl. In The Summer House (1954), a play about two mothers, one selfish and ruthless, despising her dreamy daughter, the other gentle, dominated by her strong-minded daughter, was performed on Broadway in 1953 and reflects Bowles's complicated relationship with her own mother. The volume also includes five short stories, two song lyrics, a puppet play, and the nonfiction sketch "East Side: North Africa." (Paul Bowles's rewrite of "East Side: North Africa," published in 1966, under Jane's name, as the short story "Everything Is Nice," is also included as an appendix), as well as fragments from two abandoned novels, a section of Two Serious Ladies cut from an earlier draft, four abandoned stories, one unfinished play, and one autobiographical fragment. Rounding out the volume are 133 letters, including candid portraits of such friends and acquaintances as John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. The letters are introduced with headnotes by editor Millicent Dillon, plus 10 pages of photographs have been reproduced from the original edition of the letters. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In this collection of short fiction, ranging from North Africa to South American, Bowles explores her fascination with the hidden lives of apparently ordinary middle-aged women.

Paul Bowles began travelling the moment he could - leaving America as a teenager to visit Gertrude Stein in Paris. He settled in Morocco after the war, and for thirty years travelled in North Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia, Indian and Sri Lanka (where he bought an island). He wrote articles, essays and journals along the way - writing which ranks with his novels in its astute observation, dry wit and impeccable prose. Travels brings together for the first time Paul Bowles's travel writing and journals. It includes the full text of his book Their Heads Are Green along with thirty other pieces, previously unpublished in book form. They are accompanied by fifty photos from the Bowles archive.

An “irresistible” account of a little-known literary salon and creative commune in 1940s Brooklyn (The Washington Post Book World). A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year February House is the true story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers—and America’s best-known burlesque performer—in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn. It was a fevered yearlong party, fueled by the appetites of youth and a shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before the country entered World War II. In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible. Carson McCullers’s two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workmanlike by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. W. H. Auden—who, along with Benjamin Britten, was being excoriated back in England for absenting himself from the war—presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while, he was composing some of the most important work of his career. Enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, this tale of daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century comes from the acclaimed author of Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. “Brimming with information . . . The personalities she depicts [are] indelibly drawn.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . Not to mention funny and raunchy.” —The Seattle Times

After four novels and several years of living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he falls afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in English literature. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing. Powers drills it in Chaucer and Austen and James, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master's candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete.