Above all, this is a truly mesmerizing & unforgettable work of literary art. Along with its contemporaries including James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar & Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire, this debut novel pioneeringly dared to introduce, or certainly imply, LGBT themes to a then-very conventional (even literary) society- in this case, as with Williams, within a Southern Gothic structure. This volume is an American literary icon, with its then-especially controversial jacket back cover author photograph by Harold Halma, depicting a delicate-handed Capote languidly lying on a couch with a "come hither" look in his eyes. Hardcover in unclipped first issue dust jacket (with $2.75 price printed on front flap), first edition, first printing as stated on copyright page. It is a work of no mere precocious talent but of assured creative mastery it is one of the leading incidents in the emergence of a new mode in American fiction." (front flap) The first published novel by Truman Capote (1924-1984), the legendary American writer & journalist who would go on to single-handedly create the "non-fiction novel" genre with his true-crime account In Cold Blood (1965).
Below and beyond the surface, Other Voices, Other Rooms is rich in poetic meanings and metaphorical intimations it abounds in the imagery of solitude, doubt, and fear, of discovery and love. On the surface, it is the narrative- sometimes humorous, sometimes uncanny, sometimes deeply touching- of a young boy's experiences in a desolate Southern rural community during one long and lowering summer, as he moves painfully and at times terrifyingly into emotional maturity. (Truman) Capote's first novel, like his shorter tales, expresses a delicate and highly personal fusion of the familiar, the everyday, the "realistic," with the strange, the perilous, and even the ghostly.
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