New York mosaic by Isabel Bolton

These three meticulously crafted novels in one volume examine a certain 'climate of the nerves' -- New York City of the 1940s. In comparing Isabel Bolton to Henry James and Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson wrote in 1946 that her writing 'either makes people talk or talks itself'. Voices move these stories -- each carefully constructed narrative built by the layering of conversation, perception, and inner monologue onto lyrical descriptions of the vibrating city itself. In Do I Wake or Sleep, the lives of two Americans (a journalist and an alcoholic novelist) and a beautiful European refugee intersect for just twenty-four hours as a witty Jamesian contrast of Old and New Worlds unfolds. Both The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions explore the experience of older women whose lives bridge the Victorian and modern eras. In Many Mansions an 84-year-old woman reads through her unpublished novel -- the story of her life, tracing her path from a privileged childhood to her solitary present in a hotel room on 28th Street. This 1997 Steerforth Press Hardback is in very good condition.

ISBN: 9781883642280 SKU: 1386427 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.

SKU: 1386427
Location: Fiction