Voices
$42.19
- Paperback
360 pages
- Release Date
10 March 2026
Summary
Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch’s long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the “middle-class and fancy dullness” of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis,…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9798896230120 |
|---|---|
| Author: | Frederic Prokosch, Kathryn Davis |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 360 |
| Release Date: | 10 March 2026 |
| Weight: | 378g |
Critics Review
“Prokosch’s Voices is an astonishing book.” —Simon Leys
“Mr. Prokosch’s gift is one which strikes me as astonishing. It is rich and immediate … the talent of a real visionary, and often magical.” —W.B. Yeats
“I can’t think of any other writer who captures the essence of another human being so swiftly and so wickedly.” —Kathryn Davis
“Prokosch never taught school; never sought prizes or foundation grants; never played at literary politics. He seems to have been more interested in the works or voices of others than in himself as a person (as opposed to himself as a writer), a characteristic that tends to put him outside contemporary American literature; and contemporary American literature, sensing this indifference to the games careerists play, extruded him entirely from the canon. He was like no one else.” —Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books
Frederic Prokosch
Frederic Prokosch (1908-1989) was born in Madison, Wisconsin. The son of an Austrian philologist and an American concert pianist, he sent handmade booklets of his poetry to dozens of writers he admired between 1930 and 1934. T. S. Eliot was among these recipients, and later published Prokosch’s first novel, The Asiatics.
During the Second World War, Prokosch was assigned to the American Legation in Stockholm. Afterward, he resided mostly in Europe, first in Italy and later in France. In 1972, he retired to a cottage in Grasse, living in almost total seclusion after garnering unwelcome attention for forging valuable “extra copies” of his prewar pamphlets, which had been auctioned by Sotheby’s.
In addition to his imaginative memoir, Voices, Prokosch authored sixteen novels, four collections of poetry, and translations of Euripides, Louise Labe, and Friedrich Hölterlin.
Kathryn Davis is the author of many novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, The Thin Place, Versailles, Duplex, and Silk Road, and a memoir, Aurelia Aurelia. She is the senior fiction writer in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.
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