John Hawkes

But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

The Lime Twig

A. Guerard

Cannibal

John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read.--Saul Bellow

Second Skin

An exceptionally brilliant novel from “our most interesting writer” (Flannery O’Connor) Travesty is John Hawkes’s most extreme vision of eroticism and comic terror. In the south of France, an elegant sports car is speeding through the night, bearing a man, his daughter, and his best friend toward a fatal crash. As he drives, the “privileged man” justifies, in a sustained monologue, his firm opinion that willed destruction is the ultimate act of the poetic imagination. “What I have in mind is an ‘accident’ so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular and instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived.” Concerned with sex, myth, the imagination, and the absurd, Travesty is one of the most cruelly and vibrantly ironic works to be found in twentieth-century literature.

Travesty

Asleep by a lily pond just before World War I, a young French child swallows a frog that not only survives within him but becomes a companion for life, sharing his physical and psychological pain but also giving him a strange sort of power over others

The Frog

The Blood Oranges

"John Hawkes (author of thirteen previous novels, including The Lime Twig, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, Virginie, and The Blood Oranges) is one of American fiction's most honored, irascible - and most unpredictable - talents. Now Hawkes delivers what is destined to become his most popular novel, the autobiography of a wise, witty, unforgettable...horse." "Sweet William is fresh and lively, a completely compelling reading experience, and a truly human, humane tale. In this anthropomorphic odyssey, Hawkes takes us into the rough world of Old Horse from his Dickensian youth (marked by the death of his beloved dam), through his years on the racetrack of life, to his relationship with Master, the man whose kindness transforms his beastly life." "Old Horse is a figure whose trek through the world's multitude of shifting circumstances symbolizes all the tests and challenges faced by every beast. Hawkes brings real heart and moments of savage humor to this equine saga."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Memoir of Old Horse

Sweet William

Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. The author of seven full-length novels, several plays, and numerous short fictions, John Hawkes over the course of two and a half decades has won international acclaim. Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. “It is an exceptionally concise and beautiful work,” writes the novelist-critic Jonathan Baumbach, “delicate, erotic, dreamlike—in all, a luminous novel by the richest prose stylist in American letters since Faulkner.”

Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel

Three early novels by John Hawkes This volume brings together three early novels by John Hawkes. The Lime Twig is set in the underworld of postwar London; Second Skin is a tale of suicide and new life on two mythical islands; and Travesty is a monologue on fear and eroticism that takes place during a drive at night. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Innocence in Extremis

" ... Hawkes's own selection from his novels, stories, and his current novel-in-progress, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. In autobiographical commentaries, Hawkes provides a context for each of the selections and discusses the genesis and the writing of his work. As a novelist whose creative life has depended largely on travel, he evokes the actual places that have inspired his imaginary worlds: the Alaska of his boyhood; the Caribbean island where he wrote Second Skin; the Germany he knew as an ambulance driver in World War II; the South of France where he searched for images of Picasso and the Marquis de Sade."--Cover.

A John Hawkes Reader : Autobiographical Notes

Humors of Blood & Skin

A Western tall tale and a psychological thriller of stunning insight and depth, this is Hawkes' most ambitious work ever.

Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade

Rick Moody

A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

The Passion Artist

From the National Book Award winner comes the moving novel of Sweet William, an old thoroughbred horse, who recounts the trials and tribulations of his life. Sweet William shares the glory of his days as a race horse--and as a broken-down mount transformed by the kindness of a strange old man.

The author shares selections from his novels and stories, and describes the background of each work

A middle-aged Dutchman whose marriage is deteriorating is accused of committing murder while on a cruise

Death, Sleep and the Traveler

After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life.

The Beetle Leg

After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life. The Beetle Leg, John Hawkes's second full-length novel, was first published by New Directions in 1951. After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life. As a 'surrealist Western" (Newsweek), and a violent and poetic portrayal of "a landscape of sexual apathy" (Albert J. Guerard), The Beetle Leg is a rich flight into the special vein of comedy that Hawkes had begun to exploit a decade before the popular acceptance of "black humor."

The Beetle Leg: A Novel

No synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power—sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a “sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love. "Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity . . . is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?" Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel The Blood Oranges is boldly asserted by its narrator, Cyril, the archetypal multisexualist. Likening himself to a white bull on Love's tapestry, he pursues his romantic vision in a primitive Mediterranean landscape. There two couples—Cyril and Fiona, Hugh and Catherine—mingle their loves in an "lllyria" that brings to mind the equally timeless countryside of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

The Blood Oranges: A Novel

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949.

John Hawkes

About

Books

Join the club