Bücher von Elizabeth Bowen

''Bowen''s stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them'' VogueSELECTED AND WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEYA girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies'' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil.Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen''s finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen''s ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen''s native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz.Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body.

The publication of Encounters in1923 launched what would become a luminous forty-year writing career that spanned the advent of modernist literature, the Second World War, and the fraught years preceding the political turmoil of "the Troubles" in Ireland. These gem-like stories display Elizabeth Bowen's uncanny ability to represent un-belonging, dispossession, and the fragility of selfhood. With astonishing literary adroitness and psychological acuity, she depicts the comedy of British class society, the fracturing of external perception, the pervasive influence of suppressed sexuality, and the abiding force of adolescent epiphanies. Her deft use of language to convey the interior atmosphere of her characters' lives renders these tales as moving as they are timeless.