Other Voices Other Doors

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

"Other Voices, Other Towns" has, in reality, taken Caleb Pirtle III a lifetime to write. During the thirty years he has been writing about travel across this great land, he spent much of his time listening to those whose paths he crossed. Pirtle collects people. He collects their stories. He is firmly convinced that everyone who has ever walked across the street has a great story to tell if only someone will take the time to listen. Pirtle has recorded many of them in "Other Voices, Other Towns." The sketches, the anecdotes, the tales they tell, the memories they have stored, their lessons of life make you feel better or make you want to cry. Their stories are filled with disappointments and with inspiration: The blind man who tends his beehives in the Smoky Mountains and knows that someday "I'm going to where the mountains are higher and prettier and you don't get bee stung." The rancher who bought a whole town because it had a beer joint, and he could get a drink any time he was thirsty. The woman who built a major university on the strength of a dime. The grieving father searching for "the best little girl in the world." The vagabond who became a great writer because he flunked grammar and could not enroll in college. The last man on the mountain, the last survivor on an island, the last woman strong enough to tame though not civilize the Okefenokee Swamp. The teacher who taught history in school by singing the lessons he had written as songs. The men who created "Lum and Abner." The scientist digging for clues to prove a space ship had crashed in the backyard of Aurora, Texas. The performer who rescued the abandoned remains of a crumbling theater. The actor who figured out that a theater ticket was worth a mess of greens or a gallon milk during the Great Depression. The old con artist and wildcatter who defied the odds and discovered a great oilfield. The politician who had one cause, passed it in the legislature, and went home because there were no other bills that concerned him. The fishermen who stumbled across pearls in a landlocked lake. The girl singer who rode in a small RV behind the star until she became the star. The sad journey down the trail of broken promises. And the greatest worm fiddler of them all. For Pirtle, other voices in other towns, have all been joined together to form the traveler's story.

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are In Cold Blood, Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capote’s extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy. Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany’s shares not only the author’s philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany’s; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid “that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.” Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father—who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.

No.1 - Mischief on Campus (Dieppe revisited): The word "Dieppe" recalls the horror of that disaster - 900 killed and 1500 taken prisoner - and makes us think of the effect that carnage had on those who came back to tell the story. Many, such as Dylan Magee returned to university or entered as a freshman. The challenge was daunting; the sudden change from uniform to civies, from guns to books, did not heal all wounds. No. 2 - Pamela's Potted Ferns: This lighter piece, tells of a young, naïve volunteer's introduction to the world of volunteerism. He offers to serve lunch to the elderly and the poor. He listens to their stories but gets carried away by their clever little follies. No. 3 - The Little Eagle, (the Aiglon), a member of the French Résistance, and a national hero, becomes a hit-man in disguise, when the government fails to grant him the Légion d'honneur for his outstanding war-time services. A specialist in plastic explosives, he makes a contract with Anatole, a wealthy young scion, to "wipe his family slate clean" by eliminating his late father's mistress and her bastard child. No. 4 - David and Goliath: Here we meet a big bully in a Paris High School who gets his comeuppance. The bully is brought down by a smaller, younger boy, who applies certain basic elements of pugilistic science - and becomes the school hero. No. 5 - A Dazzling Discovery: Paul, a young architect, seeks a restful escape after a great personal tragedy. He goes to the U.K. on a quiet package tour. No sooner is he settled in his hotel room when he finds himself in the crossfire of a criminal investigation dating back ten years. He learns that Sebastian, one of a group of diamond thieves - involved in a £3,000,000 diamond heist - is trying to take over his hotel room. Chief Inspector Spencer places a guard in the hall for Paul's protection. Thanks to a series of insights, Paul finds the diamonds, but tells no one. He decides to disappear into the shady enclaves of the black market, hoping to emerge a wealthy man. No. 6 - Birth of a Portrait: A sensitive young artist prepares his charcoal sketch for a portrait to be entered in an international contest. His subject is a strikingly handsome boy with remarkable features. Since the boy is a pianist, the artist takes his time to find the right pose at the piano. He emphasizes the boy's hands as well as his strong, handsome face. Will he be able to capture on canvas the youthful beauty of his subject and win the prize? No. 7 - An Angel's Touch: A terrible car accident takes place in New York. The driver dies in the emergency ward. Three other passengers are spared. Suddenly they are all spirited away in a passing taxi before the police or the ambulance arrives. The police are baffled. No trace of the victims can be found in the hospital or in their wrecked, rental car. The case is written off as thw work of the Mafia. Years later, John Steele (one of the survivors) receives a midnight phone call from the hospital asking him to visit Charles Fleming, a missionary whose death he had witnessed forty years ago! No. 8 - Mint-Fresh Canadian: An amusing and disturbing contrast between the thoughts and attitudes of a brand-new Canadian and a regular Canadian who takes his citizenship for granted. No. 9 - A Naughty Affair: The scene is Paris. A sudden and unexpected flirtation evolves between a struggling young artist and a wealthy widow twice his age. An excellent dinner, preceded by too many apéritifs and followed by too many glasses of champagne, sets the stage for this encounter - prolonged beyond measure - by his warm, eager, and passionate entreaty to paint her portrait. No. 10 - Phantom Lake: The story takes place in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a small mining town. Young love teaches the elders a leasson when family strife, money, and myste

Other Voices, Other Places is a novel about an evangelistic witness by thousands of born-again redeemed spirits in Heaven, made ready for spiritual service to a failing humanity on Earth. These spiritual workers have received the most complete, personal, and experiential knowledge from teachings by Old and New Testament characters, writers, and prophets. Challenges, though, exist. A world awaits, full of doubt, suspicion, and ridicule. Evil is also actively involved with its own commentaries and plans. The voice of Sybil Davies, a storyteller from Heaven, calls out to humanity on Earth to keep hope, faith, and trust alive. She is reporting on the eventual full victory of “good” over “evil” and the awarding of eternal life.

John Donelly's life is changed forever the day Laura, a young therapy patient, tells him that she has been left for a year on Earth by the Holock, an alien race. If she can convince one person - and she has chosen him - that she is telling the truth, she can stay when they come back for her. And she exposes her breasts as evidence, revealing square nipples. His least profound response is to drop his cigarette into the crease in his chair. So begins the wildest SF novel since the passing of Philip K. Dick. Patrick O'Leary's Door Number Three is a constant wellspring of surprise and wonder, a novel about a young man of today and a woman from somewhere else who is out to love or kill him - or both. The whole, apparently real, world and everything in it can never be the same again. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorce is not just a question of a broken marriage but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie’s childhood in pre–World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life. Susan Taubes’s startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored at the time; after the author’s tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to discover a splintered, glancing, caustic, and lyrical work by a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer.