Plain Pleasures

Readers who’ve not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who’ve still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come. * Ali Smith *
One of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language. * John Ashberry *
A thoroughly original mind - a mind at once profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true. * Claire Messud *
A modern legend … A very funny writer … with at [her] heart the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness. * Truman Capote *

A dizzyingly original stylist

Bowles is a master of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written

The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters

Jane Bowles has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1917, she lived in Tangier, Morocco, with her husband, Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death in 1973. Though she wrote only one novel, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation.

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