Kay Boyle Knihy

Robert McAlmon arrived in 1920s Paris like many other young Americans who wanted to live. He was perceptive, sardonic, and unyielding. Above all, he was not easily impressed by the various geniuses he encountered on bar stools, often while they were finishing convincing themselves of their genius. In many cases, they were right. The first among them, always observed with a barely concealed impatience mixed with admiration, was James Joyce. Shortly after, Gertrude Stein, walking the streets in her uniform and "sandals that looked like the prow of a gondola," coined the term "lost generation." Many books have been written since then about the "movable feast" of those years. Often, even the protagonists would end up representing themselves as if in a costume film. Not so McAlmon. Perhaps because he never became as famous as some of his friends, like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Ezra Pound. Perhaps because he did not possess their genius. But he certainly had the clear-sightedness and the quality of a great irreverent chronicler. Thus, he left us, in those prodigious and audacious years, the book that more than any other conveys the invigorating sense of precise observation—and enveloping irony.

This stunning short novel portrays a family--an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father--and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him.

'Papa says we should have a child,' he said. 'A dear little child to run around and call us mama and papa. I can give it paralysis, what can you give it, my dear?'This extraordinary novel, first published in 1931, recounts the love story of the American girl Bridget and the young Frenchman Nicolas whom she marries. Bridget goes to live with his wealthy, close-knit family in their Breton village and finds there a group -- mother, father, sisters, and brother-in-law -- who love each other to the exclusion of the outside world.But it is a love that festers, for the family is tainted with an inherited bone disease, a plague which, Bridget slowly discovers, can also infect the soul. Then Luc -- young, handsome, healthy -- arrives and Bridget is faced with a confronting the Old World with the courage of the New she makes the bravest choice of all...In subtle, rich and varied prose Kay Boyle echoes Henry James in a novel at once lyrical, delicate and shocking.

A collection of eleven short stories of occupied Germany where Kay Boyle has spent the last two years, introduced by a longer piece on the trial of the ""Frankfort Butcher"", Heinrich Boab. Both here, and in the stories, the ""true computation is fervently made"" that here, in the German people, is no realization of guilt, no knowledge of guilt. The stories are enormously effective, compassionate, bitter, sharpened by the understated, the unsaid,-and it is in the short story situation (rather than in the novel) that Kay Boyle is particularly gifted. There's the arson revenge of a German child against an American family; a take-off of the Amis in Cabaret, a touching tribute to a soldier, and the little boy he outfits, and a harsh scoring of the occupation's bigger brass; and The Lost and Adam's Tod give a powerful, tacit portrayal of the victims- young and old- of displacement and discrimination... If not keyed to the preferences of her more popular audience, this will carry to her earlier, discriminating following.

Die junge Amerikanerin Hannah hat ihren französischen Ehemann für den Poeten Martin verlassen. Auch Martin muss eine Entscheidung treffen. Denn seine Tante Eve, mit deren finanzieller Unterstützung er eine Literaturzeitschrift herausgibt, stellt Bedingungen: entweder Kunst oder Liebe.

Fuir avant demain est un roman de l'crivaine amricaine Kay Boyle paru en 1932. Le lecteur est entrain dans le rcit aussi mouvant que lumineux d'une escapade tumultueuse et dsespre dans l'arrire-pays grassois, au milieu des annes vingt. Cette fiction autobiographique tmoigne d'une poque littraire faonne par l'exprience de l'exil et tourmente par le sentiment de sa finitude. Paru en franais pour la premire fois en 1937, le roman est rdit ici dam une nouvelle traduction, propose par Anne Reyns-Delobel, qui permet d'apprcier toute l'intensit et l'lgance de la prose potique de Boyle, romancire moderniste unique.

Die junge mittellose Amerikanerin Victoria kommt Ende der zwanziger Jahre nach Paris und erliegt der Faszination des Künstlers Sorrel. In seiner Kolonie scheint sie den gesuchten Ort der Zugehörigkeit gefunden zu haben. Bald muss sie jedoch die Schattenseiten des alternativen Lebens kennenlernen.

<i>Das Schweigen der Nachtigall</i> erzählt die Geschichte eines amerikanischen Mädchens, das mit einem Franzosen aus einer wohlhabenden Familie verheiratet ist, und von den zahlreichen und eher erdrückenden Verwandten des Franzosen. Bridget und Nicholas entscheiden sich, kinderlos zu bleiben, um die Erbkrankheit, die in Nicholas' Familie vorkommt, nicht weiterzugeben; doch die Familie verlangt, dass sie Kinder bekommen. Nicholas ist auf das Geld seiner Familie angewiesen, und es wird kein Geld bereitgestellt, solange es kein Kind gibt. Bridget stellt sich der Situation und meistert sie auf die einzige mögliche Weise. In diese eng verbundene Familie kommt ein gutaussehender junger Arzt, in den sich alle drei ledigen Töchter verlieben. Doch es ist Nicholas' junge Frau, die Lucs Herz gewinnt und die er schließlich bittet, mit ihm fortzugehen. Aber Bridget weist die Versuchung zurück, indem sie Luc sagt, dass sie und Nicholas ein Kind bekommen werden.