Everything Is Nice - Jane Bowles

Everything Is Nice by Jane Bowles ("A unique collection of Jane Bowles's stories, plays, sketches and letters") / ISBN 9781908745156 / 416-page paperback with flaps / discounted copy but close to perfect

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“It’s the truth,” the women said from their mattress. “Everything is nice.”

This collection gathers together all of Jane Bowles’s fictional work [but not Two Serious Ladies] ; her stories, her plays, the excised sections of Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies), fragments of two unfinished novels (Out in the World and Going to Massachusetts), and other stories edited from her notebooks by Jane’s husband, Paul Bowles, and her biographer, Millicent Dillon.

From the title story, 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 Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, these stories takes you into Jane Bowles’s edgy and exhilarating, tragicomic world. And her play, In the Summer House, included here in full, is a revelation: ‘the most original, the oddest and funniest play – and one of the most touching’, as Tennessee Williams maintained.

This edition of Jane Bowles’s work also features six letters and a chronology of her life and work.