Kay Boyle

Robert McAlmon

Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930

From Paris in the 1920s to the student strikes at San Francisco State in the 1960s, Kay Boyle chronicled much of the twentieth century. This collection includes all her published poetry as well as new work, which ranges from the intensely personal to the outspokenly political.

Collected Poems of Kay Boyle

Three Short Novels

Stephen Spender

Wolfgang Borchert

The Man Outside and Other Prose

"Kay Boyle knew everybody. In a long life (1902-1992) spent in motion between the United States and Europe she was the friend of Robert McAlmon (whose Being Geniuses Together she supplemented), with Harry and Caresse Crosby (founders of The Black Sun Press), Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst (with whom she fled World War II France), Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter, and a host of other powers and talents. Twice recipient of the O. Henry award for the best short story of the year (in 1935 for "The White Horses of Vienna" and 1941 for "Defeat"), Boyle was also an early contributor to Harriet Monroe's Poetry and published novels in every decade between the 1930s and 1990s. She published more than forty books, including fourteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, children's books, memoirs, and translations. Throughout her life Boyle wrote letters. Boyle was a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker from 1946 until 1953, when she and her Austrian husband were caught by McCarthy's red scare. Her famous correspondents include William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Stieglitz, Katherine Anne Porter, Howard Nemerov, Jessica Mitford, and Louise Erdrich. Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters gathers hundreds of her letters to tell in her own words the excitement, frustrations, intrigues, dangers, and satisfactions of the intersecting careers of Boyle and her friends. Candid and canny, Boyle wrote with freedom and wit, haste, ire, and affection. Her letters reveal as nothing else can her involvement with writing and writers"--

a twentieth-century life in letters

This stunning short novel portrays a family--an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father--and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him.

The Crazy Hunter

Year Before Last

The Underground Woman

Plagued by the Nightingale

Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart

The vigorous, athletic pro-Nazi Dr. Prochaska enters into a passionate relationship with the pampered, neurotic American woman, Pendennis, amid divided political loyalties

A Novel

Death of a Man

PLAGUED BY THE NIGHTINGA

Decision: Looks at the cost of moral choice in Franco's Spain.

Raymond RADIGUET

Le Diable Au Corps. The Devil in the Flesh. (Translation by Kay Boyle.).

"Unfathomable horror broods over this story in which two Americans become involved in the search for one man: a toxicologist who has been connected with certain notorious poisonings which had occurred in France."--Jacket.

Monday Night

Kay Boyle’s second novel, Year Before Last, was published in 1932 by Harrison Smith in New York and by Faber and Faber in London, in each case a true edition from different settings of type. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the textual editor of the Cross­currents/Modern Fiction series, has used the Harrison Smith edition in preparing this volume which is unique in the annals of textual editing of a modern novel because the emendations in the copy-text have been approved by the author. Harry T. Moore has provided a Preface which considers this work in relation to Miss Boyle’s development as a novelist. Mr. Bruccoli’s Note on the Text provides information about both the 1932 editions and lists the emendations. Against the background of the French Riviera we watch the unfolding of the story of a young woman who has left her husband for another man, a poet of compelling personality. Their love affair is complicated by the insane jealousy of an older woman which leads them to acts of desperation. This novel of love and hate moves forward in swift incident and action to a dramatic end.

Since Kay Boyle spent the years 1922 to 1941 in Europe, many of her characters and settings are European. But a deep love of nature, of mountains and water and forests make these settings universal, while the effect of nature -- a flight of birds, for instance -- on her characters suggests classic Japanese literature. The intensity with which she enters into these characters, their quandaries, their limitations, their resilience in the face of tragedy, makes memorable and honestly felt experience. -- From publisher's description.

Kay Boyle

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