Voices

“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 (1908-1989) was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of an Austrian philologist and an American concert pianist. Between 1930 and 1934, he sent handmade booklets of his poetry to dozens of writers he admired, including T. S. Eliot, who later published Prokosch’s first novel, The Asiatics. During the Second World War Prokosch was assigned to the American Legation in Stockholm and afterward resided mostly in Europe, first in Italy and later in France, where, in 1972, he retired to a cottage in the town of Grasse, living in almost total seclusion after garnering some unwelcome attention for having forged several valuable “extra copies” of his prewar pamphlets, which had been auctioned off by Sotheby’s. In addition to his imaginative memoir, Voices, he was the author of sixteen novels, four collections of poetry, and translations of Euripides, Louise Labe, and Friedrich Hölderlin.

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.