{"product_id":"voices-9798896230120","title":"Voices","description":"\u003cb\u003eJames Joyce, Viriginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and a multitude of other artistic titans are encountered and ventriloquized in this bitingly funny (and mostly fictitious) memoir by a nearly forgotten literary fantasist.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFrederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Asiatics\u003c\/i\u003e, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch's long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the \"middle-class and fancy dullness\" of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired.\u003cbr\u003e In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with \u003ci\u003eVoices\u003c\/i\u003e--a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. \u003ci\u003eVoices\u003c\/i\u003e, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch's portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall's wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W.H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his ability to capture these artists' cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrederic Prokosch\u003c\/b\u003e (1908-1989) was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of an Austrian philologist and an American concert pianist. Between 1930 and 1934, he sent handmade booklets of his poetry to dozens of writers he admired, including T. S. Eliot, who later published Prokosch's first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Asiatics\u003c\/i\u003e. During the Second World War Prokosch was assigned to the American Legation in Stockholm and afterward resided mostly in Europe, first in Italy and later in France, where, in 1972, he retired to a cottage in the town of Grasse, living in almost total seclusion after garnering some unwelcome attention for having forged several valuable \"extra copies\" of his prewar pamphlets, which had been auctioned off by Sotheby's. In addition to his imaginative memoir, \u003ci\u003eVoices\u003c\/i\u003e, he was the author of sixteen novels, four collections of poetry, and translations of Euripides, Louise Labé, and Friedrich Hölderlin. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eKathryn Davis\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of many novels, including \u003ci\u003eLabrador\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e Hell\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e The Walking Tour\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e The Thin Place\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e Versailles\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDuplex\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eSilk Road\u003c\/i\u003e, and a memoir, \u003ci\u003eAurelia Aurélia\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the senior fiction writer in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"New York Review of Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52078286766354,"sku":"9798896230120","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_d86cbac2-3d72-4d60-99af-a4f290a390c1.jpg?v=1772540822","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/voices-9798896230120","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}