John Hawkes

Dervia O'Shannon, the thirteen-year-old who tells this tale, finds herself at the dawn of true womanhood when the children of Saint Martha's Home for Foundling Girls embark on a series of festive visits to Saint Clement's Home for Old Soldiers. There Dervia meets Corporal Stack, a wry malcontent and veteran of the First World War old enough to be Dervia's grandfather. What follows is a hilarious account of courtship involving Dervia's outrageously untrue letters to her Foundling Mother (Dervia is a born liar, says Corporal Stack), the shocking injury that befalls Corporal Stack, and the pair's captivity in the near ruin of Great Manor, an Anglo-Irish estate inhabited only by the "young mistress" (a girl very like Dervia herself), her drunken brother, and a host of desolate babies. An Irish Eye is part myth, part tall tale, and part children's story intended only for adults - a rare achievement in its rendition of Dervia's "Irish" voice.

215p. ; 23cm

While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.

" ... Hawkes's own selection from his novels, stories, and his current novel-in-progress, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. In autobiographical commentaries, Hawkes provides a context for each of the selections and discusses the genesis and the writing of his work. As a novelist whose creative life has depended largely on travel, he evokes the actual places that have inspired his imaginary worlds: the Alaska of his boyhood; the Caribbean island where he wrote Second Skin; the Germany he knew as an ambulance driver in World War II; the South of France where he searched for images of Picasso and the Marquis de Sade."--Cover.

Death, sleep & the traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement with two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. It is pure, brilliant, profound- a short masterpiece of comedy and myth.

No synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power - sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a "sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love.

For nearly fifty years and in more than fourteen novels, John Hawkes has been creating his "landscapes of the imagination" and enriching the form and language of the American novel. Bringing together three early novels, this volume displays Hawkes's mastery as a prose stylist and the range and power of his gifts as an innovative writer. The Lime Twig (1961), set in postwar London, is the story of a young man who, unwittingly involved with the underworld, comes face to face with the violence and decay of contemporary society. Second Skin (1964) is a tale of suicide and new life on two mythical islands - one demonic, the other idyllic - and is a comic, magical evocation of The Tempest. Travesty (1976) is a portrait of the ultimate artist, a harrowing monologue on fear and eroticism that takes place during a drive at night in Southern France.

In this collection of prize-winning stories, characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, “Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography.”