Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell’s fourth book, is a boldly erotic novel about an overly endowed young Kentucky farmer, his painfully inhibited wife, and an outrageously provocative teen-age boy. Set amid the rigorous years of the Second World War, with the pressures of maximum production needs countered by a minimum of available farmhands, it is an authentic depiction of the way of life of millions of Americans on the home front.…

Readers of the New Directions anthologies will have some familiarity with the work of Coleman Dowell, three of whose remarkable short stories were published in ND26, 27, and 28. But with the publication of his second novel, Mrs. October Was Here, the vast range of his talents and imagination is strikingly underscored. The action of Dowell’s satirical American fantasy––like some of our dreams, both comic and frightening––takes place “out beyond the limits of the twentieth century,” in “an outpost called Tasmania, Ohio.…