Plain Pleasures

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What to expect

'It's the truth,' the women said from their mattress 'Everything is nice'.


'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'
Ali Smith

'Jane Bowles's literary output, small but perfect, puts her on a stylistic planet all her own'
New Yorker

'A dizzyingly original stylist'
New York Times

Alva, a widow, states a preference for plain ordinary pleasures - only to get drunk and flirtatious, and pass out in a strange bed when she is asked out for the evening.

Sadie, a spinster, goes to a holiday resort complete with pine groves, marshmallows and respectable clientele - to bring her nervous sister home, but instead comes to an eerie end herself.

Mary, a little girl, spends her days in a clay pit leading an imaginary army of hard-muscled men. But when a strange boy invades her headquarters, Mary abandons her soldiers to follow him home.

Disturbing, unforgettable and totally unique, Jane Bowles' short stories explore the hidden lives of women that only appear ordinary.

With an Introduction by Chris Power

Critics Review

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
New York Times
Bowles is a master of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written
William S. Burroughs
The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters
Tennessee Williams
Deserves to sit next to Mansfield, Rhys and Woolf
Chris Power

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