Plain Pleasures : Stories

A restored collection of the short fiction of an overlooked genius whose visionary style and modernist experiments with form we’re only just beginning to understand.

This stunning collection of Jane Bowles’s short fiction shows us the work of a little-understood, visionary genius. In these uncanny and insidious tales, Bowles presents us with an incendiary and groundbreaking vision of the mad possibilities of literary modernism. And for the first time ever, we’ve included the excised sections of Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies) that add even more mystery, intrigue, and allure to this most compelling and most elusive figure of twentieth-century letters.

From “Everything Is Nice,” where an American woman is led to a house in a “blue Moslem town” by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to “Camp Cataract,” a Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, these stories are a bewildering, headlong plunge into the jagged, seething, fever-dream world of Jane Bowles.