Welcome to the quintessential American town ('Oh beautiful for specious skies / For ambient waves of pain...'). Mrs. Septimus October, a lady of vast wealth whose hobby is revolution descends with her mysterious entourage to stage her great experiment―one aimed at ridding the world of hatred by focusing it on one single individual and destroying him. Her strange cadre of agents grows amid surprising, even sinister circumstances. Her bright and terrible revolution, however, takes a turn she had not anticipated, and the novel reveals itself as a ferocious, many-leveled fable.

Mrs. October Was Here

Literature & Fiction

Dowell, Coleman

Literary

New Directions

Bound in the publisher's original cloth with the spine stamped in black.

Island People (New Directions Book)

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Too much flesh and Jabez

Poetry

New Directions Pub. Corp

The first paperback edition of Dowell's humorous, violent and obsessive meditation on race relations.¶"The most penetrating novel we have ever had about blacks and whites in the United States."--Edmund White¶"Pyschological acuity, political insight, ferocious energy and authenticity of place."--New York Times Book Review

White on Black on White

Backcountry Pubns

Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.
Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" a memorable achievement.

Too Much Flesh and Jabez (American Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press

-- First paperback edition. -- A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. A collection culled from Coleman Dowell's entire career, The Houses of Children displays the wide range of his talent in a dense and beautifully stylistic prose. -- Coleman Dowell is the author of five novels including Island People and Mrs. October Was Here, and a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which won an Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. -- First published by Weidenfeld &amp; Nicolson (1987).

The houses of children: Collected stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Reunited by their father's death, the McChesneys, a prominent Southern family, still find bitter feelings divide them

One of the Children Is Crying

Grove Pr

In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.

Island People (American Literature)

Contemporary

Houses of Children (American Literature)

Coleman, Dowell

United States

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dowell, Coleman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dowell, Coleman

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dowell, Coleman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mrs. October Was Here

Mrs. October Was Here

Island People (New Directions Book)

Too much flesh and Jabez

White on Black on White

Too Much Flesh and Jabez (American Literature)

The houses of children: Collected stories

One of the Children Is Crying

Island People (American Literature)

Houses of Children (American Literature)