William Goyen

First published in 1950, The House of Breath quickly became an American classic among serious readers. In 1975, however, the book was reprinted with changes that downplayed the novel's erotic charge, and since then the original has been out of print. Readers can now rediscover one of William Goyen's most important works in this restoration of the original text. The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in a small Texas town called Charity. More than a story, The House of Breath is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes an afterword by Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University and the former editor of TriQuarterly magazine.

The House of Breath

Reginald Gibbons

Each of the twenty collected short stories--including seven previously unpublished works--creates a bewitched landscape peopled by half-mythic characters whose adventures reveal the darker side of the human psyche

New & Selected Stories, 1947-1983

Had I a Hundred Mouths

"I was twenty when I followed away from my town a trapeze family, aerialists, a group of beautiful winged people, mother, father, son and daughter. They were the Ishbels". Chris, whose leg is injured, and his lover Stella, with whom he lives in a ruined, abandoned house; Chris's male nurse; Marvello the circus aerialist; a lighthouse keeper; a flagpole sitter in small-town America - these are the creatures of William Goyen's visionary fable of love, lust, and loneliness. Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical Narrative was written in the 1950s and early 1960s, and is now being published for the first time. Part fable and part rhapsodic exploration of desire and loss, Half a Look of Cain bears Goyen's unmistakable artistic signature on every page. Too far ahead of its time in its swirling visionary structure, this novel was rejected by Goyen's first publisher as not sufficiently commercial and remained unpublished despite extensive revisions. The novel is shaped as a group of "medallions" - a series of related episodes. It dreams of defying mortality - as if living in the air, like the aerialists or the flagpole sitter - and of finding perfect companionship in lover and friend. The novel is both a rediscovered cry against the conformity and suppressed emotions of the 1950s and a celebration of passion. Reginald Gibbons has edited the novel from the author's multiple manuscripts and has contributed an illuminating afterword.

A Fantastical Narrative

Half a Look of Cain

Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of sexuality, Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, religious revivalism, and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. The narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.

Come, the Restorer

William Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, portraying religious revivalism and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. His narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.

A Novel

Interview in the Paris Review

The Collected Stories of William Goyen

The House of Breath, Goyen?s first novel, is a hymn to Charity, a small Texas town. In his celebration, Goyen evokes childhood, memory, loss and a sense of place. The book begins with Goyen?s intoxication with the spells of his birthplace: ?Those Texan wetlands are my wildness. They have haunted me and become my place in all my work.?

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walks of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately to the reader, he tells the bizarre and fantastic tale of his life. This unforgettable novel is the crown of Goyen's exploration of the forms and feelings that could be compassed within fiction.

William Goyen

Books

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