Kirjahaku

Not since D. M. Thomas's bestseller The White Hotel has there been such a remarkable novel about women, hysteria, and the profession of psychiatry as practiced by men. Set in California and Mexico in the late 1950s and early 1960s, A Version of Love is a bizarrely riveting tale of transgressive desire. Its lead players form a precarious triangle: a psychoanalyst who sleeps with his patient; a female "hysteric" on the verge of being cured; and a loner in the Sierra foothills who goes panning for gold and then love. "A dazzling achievement" (Robert Olen Butler), "a work of almost spookily controlled intelligence," A Version of Love is a breakthrough novel by Millicent Dillon, who "deserves to be honored as an American master of fiction" (Philip Lopate). "A brilliant new novel. The assurance and economy with which she gives us this strangely gripping and powerful story...are the hallmarks of a consummate artist....Her finest work yet."—Diane Johnson

Tennessee Williams called Jane Bowles "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters." John Ashbery said she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language," consistently producing "the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art." Here, available again, is the only biography of this powerful writer.

The famously enigmatic writer-composer Paul Bowles is the subject of Millicent Dillon's unforgettable new book. Her portrait of the chameleonlike artist is much more than an account of Bowles' life, however. It is also a meditation on biography that questions the biographer's role, the subject's credibility, and the very nature of 'truth' in the telling of a life. Millicent Dillon first met Paul Bowles in Tangier in 1977, when she was writing a biography of his wife, the author Jane Bowles, who died in 1973. Dillon returned to Morocco in 1992 to work with Bowles on a book about his own life. In Bowles' book-lined apartment often crowded with visitors, Dillon observes the magnetism the aging artist exerts on anyone who comes into his circle. Bowles talks of his difficult childhood and of his grief over Jane's long illness, of exile, dreams, and madness. He is charming and evasive with Dillon, generous and devious. As the book unfolds, Dillon's own reflections and concerns surface alongside details of Bowles' daily life, his physical condition, his interactions with others. Her portrait of the artist is seen simultaneously with her construction of that portrait, and in a kind of literary legerdemain we are able to observe Dillon on the biographical canvas along with Bowles and his deceased wife. Author of the international bestseller "The Sheltering Sky" and numerous other works, as well as an acclaimed composer, Paul Bowles has had an immensely rich creative life. Millicent Dillon seems to have been destined to write this unconventional biography of the artist, and the result is wonderful, disturbing, and strangely compelling, like Paul Bowles himself.