Read more
Zusatztext “A must-have treasure for Capote fans . . . These are delicious! dramatic! and tender nonfiction portraits and tales.” —NPR’s Morning Edition “A wonderful volume . . . Nearly every page can be read with real pleasure. . . . No matter what his subject! [Capote’s] canny! careful art gives it warm and breathing life” — The Washington Post Book World “Every piece is a treasure. . . . Pages and pages of remarkably evocative! careful and well-observed prose [delineate!] in a measured and elegant manner! one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the twentieth century.” —Jane Smiley! Los Angeles Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Truman Capote Klappentext From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote-also available are Breakfast at Tiffany's and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), In Cold Blood, and The Complete Stories Perhaps no twentieth-century writer was so observant and graceful a chronicler of his times as Truman Capote. Portraits and Observations is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. Included are such masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as "The Muses Are Heard" and the short nonfiction novel "Handcarved Coffins," as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to the author's last written words, "Remembering Willa Cather," composed the day before his death in 1984, Portraits and Observations puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote's brilliance. Certainly Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, "a stylist of the first quality." But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance. Leseprobe Chapter 1 NEW ORLEANS (1946) In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone, and its angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of sailor eyes, stared upward. One observed the angel from an intricate green balcony—mine, this balcony, for I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings the town is quiet. Only voices: family talk weaving on an ivy-curtained porch; a barefoot woman humming as she rocks a sidewalk chair, lulling to sleep a baby she nurses quite publicly; the complaining foreign tongue of an irritated lady who, sitting on her balcony, plucks a fryer, the loosened feathers floating from her hands, slipping into air, sliding lazily downward. One morning—it was December, I think, a cold Sunday with a sad gray sun—I went up through the Quarter to the old market, where at that time of year there are exquisite winter fruits, sweet satsumas, twenty cents a dozen, and winter flowers, Christmas poinsettia and snow japonica. New Orleans streets have long, lonesome perspectives; in empty hours their atmosphere is like Chirico, and things innocent, ordinarily (a face behind the slanted light of shutters, nuns moving in the distance, a fat dark arm lolling lopsidedly out some window, a lonely black boy squatting in an alley, blowing soap bubbles and watching sadly as they rise to burst), acquire qualities of violence. Now, on that morning, I stopped still in the middle of a block, for I’d caught out of the corner of my eye a tunnel-passage, an overgrown courtyard. A crazy-looking white hound stood stiffly in the green fern light shining at the tunnel’s end, and compulsively I went toward it. Inside there was a fountain; water spilled delica...
