The Passion Artist

A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

Literature & Fiction

John Hawkes

Literary

Harper&Row

Virginie: Her Two Loves

Hutchinson

The Cannibal

SPHERE

Whistlejacket

Contemporary

Minerva

After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life.The Beetle Leg, John Hawkes's second full-length novel, was first published by New Directions in 1951. After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life. As a 'surrealist Western" (Newsweek), and a violent and poetic portrayal of "a landscape of sexual apathy" (Albert J. Guerard), The Beetle Leg is a rich flight into the special vein of comedy that Hawkes had begun to exploit a decade before the popular acceptance of "black humor."

The Beetle Leg (New Directions Paperback)

Humor & Satire

New Directions

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. "No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of mankind within a context of fantasy.... Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more consciously analyzed than in The Cannibal. Yet one is aware throughout that such analysis proceeds only in terms of a resolutely committed humanism." - Hayden Carruth

"John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read."―Saul Bellow Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present―what he refers to as his "naked history"―in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy. The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life. Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic surreal.

Second Skin

Jeffrey, Eugenides

Reference

Channel Islands 1970 (Holiday Factbooks)

Dickens P

Portugal and Madeira 1973 (Holiday Factbooks)

Moira Hawkes

Blood Oranges

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

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Books by John Hawkes