Two Serious Ladies

The book I give as a gift is the novel TWO SERIOUS LADIES by Jane Bowles. Her sentences are so surprising, the plot is like something from a dream, and her mind is deeply unfathomable, precise, funny, earnest and otherworldly. It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit. * Sheila Heti, author of MOTHERHOOD *
Readers who’ve not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who’ve still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come. * Ali Smith *
A modern legend … A very funny writer … with at [her] heart the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness. * Truman Capote *
My favourite book. I can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic. * Tennessee Williams *
One of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language. * John Ashberry *
A landmark in 20th century American literature. * Alan Sillitoe *
With TWO SERIOUS LADIES, Bowles joined the small company of women modernists who celebrated their freakishness in the highest style. * Lorna Sage *
A thoroughly original mind - a mind at once profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true. * Claire Messud *

Jane Bowles has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1917, she lived in Tangier, Morocco, with her husband, Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death in 1973. Though she wrote only one novel, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation.

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