Plain Pleasures: Stories

“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).