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  • “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

About the Book

A unique collection of Jane Bowles’s stories, plays, sketches and letters.

“It’s the truth,” the women said from their mattress. “Everything is nice.”

THIS NEW COLLECTION gathers together all of Jane Bowles’s fictional work; her stories, her plays, the excised sections of Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies), fragments of two unfinished novels (Out in the World and Going to Massachussets), and other stories edited from her notebooks by Jane’s husband, Paul Bowles, and her biographer, Millicent Dillon.  (Her novel, Two Serious Ladies is published separately by Sort of Books)

From the title story, Everything is Nice, where an American woman is led to a house in a ‘blue moslem town’ by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to Camp Cataract, a Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, these stories takes you into Jane Bowles’s edgy and exhilarating, tragicomic world. And her play, In the Summer House, included here in full, is a revelation: ‘the most original, the oddest and funniest play – and one of the most touching’, as Tennessee Willliams maintained.
This edition of Jane Bowles’s work also features six letters and a chronology of her life and work.