Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms

Informationen zum Autor Truman Capote Klappentext From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote-also available are In Cold Blood, Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capote's extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy. Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany's shares not only the author's philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany's; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid "that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets." Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father-who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms   Chapter 1   I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again. Holly Golightly had been a tenant in the old brownstone; she’d occupied the apartment below mine. As for Joe Bell, he ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue; he still does. Both Holly and I used to go there six, seven times a day, not for a drink, not always, but to make telephone calls: during the war a private telephone was hard to come by. Moreover, Joe Bell was good about taking messages, which in Holly’s case was no small favor, for she had a tremendous many. Of course this was a long time ago, and until last week I hadn’t seen Joe Bell in several years. Off and on we’d kept in touch, and occasionally I’d stopped by his bar when passing through the neighborhood; but actually we’d never been strong friends except in as much as we were both friends of Holly Golightly. Joe Bell hasn’t an easy nature, he admits it himself, he says it’s because he’s a bachelor and has a sour stomach. Anyone who knows him will tell you he’s a hard man to talk to. Impossible if you don’t share his fixations, of which Holly is one. Some others are: ice hockey, Weimaraner dogs, Our Gal Sunday (a soap serial he has listened to for fifteen years), and Gilbert and Sullivan—he claims to be related to one or the other, I can’t remember which. And so when, late last Tuesday afternoon, the telephone rang and I heard “Joe Bell here,” I knew it must be about Holly. He didn’t say so, just: “Can you rattle righ...

Product details

• Authors: Truman Capote
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.02.2013
• EAN: 9780812994360
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-9436-0
• No. of pages: 286
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 210 mm x 22 mm
• Series: MODERN LIBRARY; Modern Library
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature