"The Countess Nattatorrini, nee Ella Poore, has returned home to Iowa after twenty tempestuous years on the Continent. Time has stood still in Maple Valley--a Cedar Rapids look-alike whose residents are seen as little more than animated rocking chairs who chew gum, gossip on their front porches, enjoy euchre parties and buckwheat griddle cakes, and brag endlessly of the new waterworks. Into this complacent town bursts the Countess, a full-blown, impulsive widow who dares to dye her hair, smokes cigarettes in public, wears her gowns cut low and her jewels in layers, and admits that after her lips are made up she can say things she could never have said before. Needless to say, the good folks of Maple Valley are awestruck--but not struck silent--by this exotic vision. Just as the Countess finds herself bored beyond endurance, she meets the one boy in Maple Valley who deserves a good education"--Back cover.

From his birth in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression to his suicide in Manhattan in 1985, Coleman Dowell played many roles. He was a songwriter and lyricist for television. He was a model. He was a Broadway playwright. He served in the U.S. Army, both abroad and at home. And most notably, he was the author of novels that Edmund White, among others, has called "masterpieces." But Dowell was deeply troubled by a depression that hung over him his entire life. Pegged as both a Southern writer and a gay writer, he loathed such categorization, preferring to be judged only by his work. Fever Vision describes one of the most tormented, talented, and inventive writers of recent American literature, and shows how his eventful life contributed to the making of his incredible art.

Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a key advocate for modernism across the arts in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a critic of music, dance, and literature, as novelist, as photographer, as patron of the arts, and as saloniste, he exerted an influence on the development and reception of popular and avant-garde forms of modernism – from jazz, blues, and early cinema to Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky. Though currently less well-known than ‘Lost Generation’ contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Van Vechten was a popular and critically acclaimed figure in his day. Van Vechten’s novels are worthy of recuperation for their distinctive take on the raucous spirit of the Jazz Age, bringing a witty and sardonic viewpoint to issues that his modernist contemporaries approached with gravity. This edition brings back into print Van Vechten’s second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), which his most recent biographer has called a ‘great, forgotten American novel of the 1920s’. It is thoroughly annotated and provides an introduction that foregrounds the novel’s importance for literary modernism and as a treatment of queer identity.