Prose
The Centenary Edition
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Although Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps better known as a masterful poet, she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as this centenary edition of her prose demonstrates. From her witty, unforgettable portraits of Marianne Moore and the Sitwells to her engaging childhood recollections of Canada and Massachusetts, her writing reflects a lifelong fascination with memory and travel, and her unique eye and ear for people and places.
This new volume - edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Lloyd Schwartz - includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Included here are her stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and - for the first time - the original draft of Brazil, the Life World Library volume she repudiated in its published version, as well as extensive selections from the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson. Here is a rich and revealing selection, and the indispensible companion to the poems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The most exciting part of the Bishop reissue project may be this volume, which contains all of the prose published in her lifetime, as well as a few hard to find things and a thing or two you won't find anywhere else. As a frequent contributor to the New Yorker (the poet's decades-long relationship with the magazine is brought to life in The Complete Correspondence) and other publications, Bishop crafted all kinds of prose, from autobiographical short stories ("In the Village") to loving reminiscences ("Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"); she was as original a prose writer as she was a poet, an under-known fact this volume may help solidify once and for all. The real gem of this book is "Brazil," a book-length essay on Bishop's adopted homeland, whose published version, which came out as a Time-Life guide, Bishop hated. Here we have her original draft, written in her inimitable style: "The history of South America in the nineteenth century resembles Shakespeare's battle scenes: shouts and trumpets; small armies on stage, small armies off stage..." Take that, Lonely Planet! (This title is also available with Poems as a hardcover boxed set, $75, .)
