Search results for ""Author Coleman Dowell""
Dalkey Archive Press Island People
In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.
£12.78
Dalkey Archive Press Houses of Children
-- First paperback edition. -- A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. A collection culled from Coleman Dowell's entire career, The Houses of Children displays the wide range of his talent in a dense and beautifully stylistic prose. -- Coleman Dowell is the author of five novels including Island People and Mrs. October Was Here, and a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which won an Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. -- First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1987).
£9.15
Dalkey Archive Press Star-Bright Lie
A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to "make it" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's "Golden Boy, " a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: "his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).
£15.80
Dalkey Archive Press Review of Contemporary Fiction No.2 New Japanese Fiction-Vol.22
Dedicated to the discussion and celebration of innovative fiction, the Review of Contemporary Fiction has featured the most influential authors of the twentieth century for over twenty years.This summer, with the issue on New Japanese Fiction, RCF will return to featuring interesting new fiction from around the world. This issue builds on a tradition in place since the origin of RCF, and has included publication of issues devoted to: New Italian Fiction (156478-121-6), New Danish Fiction (1-56478-127-5), New Finnish Fiction (1-56478-098-8) and New Latvian Fiction (1-56478-178-X).The fall issue highlights the new format for RCF, featuring long essays on two to four authors that provide both an introduction to their fiction and interpretative strategies for reading their work. For a complete list of recent issues.In addition, each issue features an extensive book review section, focused on contemporary fiction that is generally not reviewed by the mainstream media.
£10.12
