Jane Bowles – författare

Djupsinnig & humoristisk amerikansk klassiker

»En modern kultklassiker« The Guardian

Den excentriska och äventyrliga Christina Goering träffar den nervösa men lika företagsamma Mrs Copperfield på en fest. Det är två allvarsamma kvinnor ur den övre medelklassen som vill få ut mer av livet än vad de blivit serverade. De ger sig båda iväg på jakt efter någon sorts frälsning: Mrs Copperfield åker till Panama i sällskap med sin make, där hon finner tröst bland de kvinnor som lever och arbetar på landets bordeller, medan Miss Goering har affärer med. diverse olika män. Till sist träffas de båda kvinnorna på nytt nu förvandlade av sina erfarenheter. Två allvarligt sinnade damer är en mystisk, djupsinnig, anarkistisk och humoristisk roman, som kommit att betraktas som en amerikansk klassiker och har hyllats av författare som Truman Capote och Tennessee Williams. I översättning av Eva Thomson-Roos, med ett nyskrivet förord av författaren och kritikern Torbjörn Elensky.

JANE BOWLES [född i en judisk familj i New York 1917, död 1973 i Málaga i Spanien] var en amerikansk författare och dramatiker. Hon utvecklade i tonåren ett brinnande litteraturintresse, och efter att ha bott bland annat i Schweiz bosatte hon sig i mitten av 1930-talet i New York, där hon drogs till de intellektuella bohemkretsarna i Greenwich Village. 1938 gifte hon sig med författaren Paul Bowles.

»Min favoritroman« Tennessee Williams

»Jane Bowles är ett underskattat geni.« The Guardian

“The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters . . . Her work, her life: deep truth, observed without pretension, with humor and humanity. As artist and person, an angel.” —Tennessee Williams In these uncanny and insidious tales, Jane Bowles presents an incendiary and groundbreaking vision of the mad possibilities of literary modernism. From “Everything Is Nice,” where an American woman is led to a house in a “blue Moslem town” by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to “Camp Cataract,” a tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread set in Colorado, these stories are a bewildering, headlong plunge into the jagged, fever-dream world of Jane Bowles. And for the first time ever, this collection includes the excised sections of Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies).

''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 MessudI 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 DolanA W&N Essential

''It''s the truth,'' the women said from their mattress ''Everything is nice''.

"Two Serious Ladies is a singular achievement - a modernist cult classic." - The Guardian

"The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters" - Tennessee Williams

Inspired by the author''s honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943) is the only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles. A modernist cult-classic - mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny - that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery; jettisoning sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation. Abandoning her family home, Miss Goering decamps to a dilapidated house on an island, but asceticism yields swiftly to increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. Mrs Copperfield dutifully accompanies her husband on a cruise to Panama, but falls in love with a prostitute and is swallowed up by a seedy world of bars and bordellos. When the two meet again, they are much changed - both have suffered the depredations of their deadbeat odysseys, but have found a new strength too.

"[Bowles] has a very special way of seeing things ... master of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written." - William S. Burroughs

"Bowles''s spare, elliptical prose has a hallucinatory quality, pierced by moments of startling clarity and wit. Her characters retain a sphinx-like opacity, as unsettling as it is engrossing." - The Guardian

"A modern legend" - Truman Capote

"Bowles was a dizzyingly original stylist, and the texture of her writing and her dialogue in particular - staccato, self-confidently awkward - is unmistakably her own." - The New York Times

About the author

Jane Bowles (born Jane Auer, 1917-1973) - a daring and stylish modernist - has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. The author of a novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and a volume of stories, Plain Pleasures. 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"; Truman Capote said she was a "modern legend"; and for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Jane Auer grew up in New York City, where as a teenager she became part of a bohemian, bisexual scene, along with the writer Paul Bowles. The pair married in 1938, somewhat impulsively, as both primarily pursued same-sex relationships (when she met Bowles, she told a friend, "He''s my enemy"). Jane Bowles belonged to the New York artistic circles of the 1940s before moving with Paul to Paris and Tangier, where she knew Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Though her body of work was relatively small, Bowles has enjoyed a large literary influence, with Edmund White writing that "the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have." Besides her literary output, Bowles''s letters-to Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowles, and about John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Alice Toklas, Gore Vidal, and Eudora Welty, among others-are by turns candid and heartbreaking, both serious and seriously funny. At the age of 40, Jane suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.

"Her dark, furiously readable tales of self-destructive women are plainly influenced by the European existentialists. But her literary method was as American, and as deadly, as a Colt .45." - The Wall Street Journal