Kay Boyle

“I think my Crazy Hunter is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Kay Boyle wrote to her sister Joan in 1939, two weeks after she had finished writing it. Twenty years later she wrote to a friend, it “remains one of my best, I think.” This stunning short novel portrays a family––an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father––and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him.…

Kay Boyle’s Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: “the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic…She is still unquestionably modern” (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review).…

Now reissued in The Revived Modern Classics series, Kay Boyle’s Three Short Novels can once again startle the unwary reader with their brilliant combination of keen observation, skillfully crafted prose, and moral awareness. In “The Crazy Hunter” the killing of a blinded gelding is pivotal in a power struggle between a businesslike mother, a feckless father, and an almost grown daughter. In “The Bridegroom’s Body” swans become surrogates for human emotion in a story of suppressed passion and the unquestioned male subjugation of women.…

When Death of a Man was first published in 1936, the anonymous reviewer in Time described the novel as a “Nazi idyll.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Boyle, who lived in the town of Kitzbühel in the Tirolean Alps during the mid 30s, recalls that “In 1934, mothers, fathers, children––all barefoot––stood in the ankle-deep snow on the sidewalks of Vienna, their hands out-stretched for help …. Nazism as to them mutely accepted as the one hope for the economy.…

In both her art and her life, Kay Boyle has exemplified that quality she values most in other artists––the bold articulation of a passionately held belief. An American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941, Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the “revolution of the word.” Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in Life Being the Best & Other Stories, are masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life.…

“Miss Boyle is a story teller, a superb one; by and large the best in this country and one of the best now living,” the Saturday Review wrote when Thirty Stories was first published. Selected from over one hundred stories written during twenty years, this volume includes many of her celebrated titles, masterpieces each in their separate ways, “Wedding Day,” “Black Boy,” “The White Horses of Vienna,” “Count Lothar’s Heart,” “The Loneliest Man in the U.…

Wolfgang Borchert died in 1947––the twenty-six-year-old victim of a malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day after the premier of his play, The Man Outside, which caused an immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine.…