Evan S Connell Books In Order

Bridge Books In Order

  1. Mrs. Bridge (1960)
  2. Mr. Bridge (1969)

Novels

  1. The Patriot (1960)
  2. Points for a Compass Rose (1973)
  3. The Connoisseur (1974)
  4. Double Honeymoon (1976)
  5. Alchymist’s Journal (1991)

Collections

  1. The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories (1957)
  2. The Collected Stories Of Evan S. Connell (1995)
  3. Lost in Uttar Pradesh (2008)

Non fiction

  1. The Diary of a Rapist (1966)
  2. A Long Desire (1979)
  3. The White Lantern (1980)
  4. Son of the Morning Star (1984)
  5. Deus Lo Volt! (2000)
  6. The Aztec Treasure House (2001)
  7. Francisco Goya (2003)

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Evan S Connell Books Overview

Mrs. Bridge

In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. With a surgeon’s skill, Connell cuts away the middle class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneath the entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs. Bridge‘s three children and husband to recede into a remote silence, and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, events all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation. In this special fiftieth anniversary edition, we are reminded once again why Mrs. Bridge has been hailed by readers and critics alike as one of the greatest novels in American literature.

Mr. Bridge

Evan S. Connell achieved fame with his remarkable biography of General Armstrong Custer, SON OF MORNING STAR. But he was an accomplished artist long before that. His literary reputation rests in large measure on his two Bridge books.

Mr. Bridge is the companion volume to Connell’s MRS. BRIDGE. It is made up of fragments of experience from the life of a middle aged suburban couple between two wars. Brief episodes are juxtaposed to reveal the stereotyped values and emotional and spiritual aridity of the prosperous and ever so proper Bridges.

‘Connell’s art is one of restraint and perfect mimicry. His chapters are admirably short, his style is brevity itself…
rarely has a satirist damned his subject with such good humor.’ The New York Times

The Patriot

In this collection of poems, the author meditates on the follies, cruelties and frailties of humankind adopting an outraged, vehement and sardonic tone as he gazes through his ‘teleidoscope’ an instrument for viewing the images of the ends of things.

The Connoisseur

Acclaimed author Evan S. Connell sends us through the complete experience of a man initially intrigued and then enslaved by art: a curious interest, a rapt fixation, and the becoming of a connoisseur. The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden affinity for a little figurine, Muhlbach succumbs to his intrigue and, thirty dollars later, begins his journey as a connoisseur.

With superb delivery and subtle clarity, Connell allows us to see and feel Muhlbach’s emerging mania, with its impending tension and sudden exhilaration. He illustrates how a new fixation alters our lens on life and shapes our actions.

Alchymist’s Journal

Capturing the spirit of arcane writing, Evan S. Connell delivers spectacular and esoteric prose as he imagines the journals of seven alchemists. The first is Paracelsus, the famous sixteenth century alchemist, who is followed by an array of distinct voices: physicians, historians, alchemists, and philosophers. Each employs a unique personality and point of view in a world of pre scientific thought, of the western world about to step into modernity. Though this historical recreation is medieval in style, Connell succeeds in infusing his diarists with alchemic wisdom, ancient appeal, and felt humanness. A work of rigid art and astute mimicry, Connell’s work is intelligent and remarkable, medieval yet applicable to modernity. Alchymic Journals is, at its core, a study of humanity from the mind of one of America s greatest writers.

The Collected Stories Of Evan S. Connell

A master of short fiction, Evan Connell’s stories go right to the heart of the American character. Collected here are 56 stories gathered from his writing career, some heartbreaking and some comic. ‘A finely wrought study of human nature, masterfully blending its flaws and virtues.’ Seattle Times.

Lost in Uttar Pradesh

Although he may be best known for his novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, or perhaps for his brilliant biography of Custer, Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell is an undisputed master of the short story. His restraint, concision, and perfect pitch lend themselves beautifully to the form, and he intuitively senses when to explain and when to let silence stand in speech’s stead. Lost in Uttar Pradesh collects new work by Connell along with some of his earlier masterpieces. Memorable characters like the corpulent Mr. Bemis, Katia and her lion, and a wanderer back from Spain ring true not because their stories are filled with monumental events but because they center around seemingly insignificant events that somehow remain in the mind. Through Connell s mastery, the most trivial happening, the voice that speaks only once, resonates far beyond the final page.

The Diary of a Rapist

The 1960s: news of riots, war, unheard of behavior, and rampant crime crowds the papers and the airwaves. Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, a young man not so young anymore sits in his cramped San Francisco apartment channeling everything around him into a diary that is a perfect record of a world going to pieces. The words he overhears, the words he wants to say, swim in his head, turning into fantasies of retribution, ambition, and love. He is sorry for himself. He is angry with everyone. He takes to going out at night, slipping into other people’s empty houses. He writes everything down. He is looking for something, and he fixates on a woman. Diary of a Rapist is an extraordinary picture, at once terrifying and pitiful, of a peculiarly American creep.

Son of the Morning Star

Custer’s Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as ‘one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers,’ wrote what continues to be the most reliable and compulsively readable account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist’s eye for the story and detail to re vreate the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

Deus Lo Volt!

From the best selling author of Son of the Morning Star and Mrs. Bridge comes a magisterial tale of a great and terrible campaign, recounting one soldier’s experiences of the defining war of Christendom. ‘God wills it!’ The year is 1095 and the most prominent leaders of the Christian world are assembled in a meadow in France. Deus Lo Volt! This cry is taken up, echoes forth, is carried on. The Crusades have started, and wave after wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land. Two centuries long, it will become the defining war of the Western world. ‘Magnificent stuff. Readers who have already been captivated by Connell’s departures from conventional fictional form will be eager to follow him down this curious and remarkable book’s intricate, pristine, and illuminating path.’ Kirkus Reviews starred review ‘As presented by Connell, the medieval mind is a promiscuous mix of piety and brutality…
Connell’s antiquarian ‘forgery,’ which is in the line of novels like Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, is a great feat of historical empathy.’ Publishers Weekly

The Aztec Treasure House

A collection of new and selected essays by master craftsman Evan S. Connell. Evan Connell has long been attracted to the visionary and eccentric, to those people and events slightly outside the mainstream of human experience. His subjects are people of passion and purpose, events of legend and desire. He offers stories of the Anazasi, the ‘old ones’ of the southwestern desert, of the grand explorers Marco Polo, Columbus, Magellan, and Ibn Batuta, of heretics, fanatics, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. There are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archeology, astronomy, and linguistics. This is a book of great ‘celebrations of man’s insatiable drive to probe unknown frontiers that read like superb novels,’ says Grover Sales of the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘ They establish Connell as an important writer poet thinker with a truly original mind.’ The Aztec Treasure House comprises two previous collections, The White Lantern and A Long Desire, and two new essays never published in trade book form. The whole amounts to a dazzling monument to the career of one of America’s finest writers.

Francisco Goya

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt! , a biography that breaks the mold recounting with stunning immediacy the dark genius behind the renowned Spanish painter.

Goya’s protean talent sends connoisseurs barking in various directions. He was a master whose image of Saturn bloodily devouring his son is as unforgettable as his peerless rendering of the gentle light caught in the white satin gown of a countess. Most critics agree that Goya changed Western art forever, although the nature of his influence has been widely interpreted. Degas, for one, lamented that because of Goya he was condemned to painting a housewife in her bathtub.

This enigmatic artist is a brilliant choice of subject for Evan S. Connell, whose literary histories and penetrating novels have placed him amongst our greatest writers. With his famous wit, erudition and prodigious research, this biography brings to life an artist whose imagination is unsurpassed, and his brutal times Spain in the clutches of the Inquisition. In a colloquial, wry style, Connell introduces a wealth of detail and a comic cast of weird and eccentric characters dukes, duchesses, royalty, politicians and artists; as lewd and incorrigible a group as history has ever produced. As he charts the arc of Goya’s career, he keeps pace with the tumultuous times as well as shrewdly sifting through two centuries of commentary, from Claudel’s shock and dismay that he sought to avoid the eyes and the image of God, to Baudelaire’s deadly accurate comment that ‘he painted the black magic of our civilization.’

Connell has conjured Goya, his art, and his times with fierce originality and imagination. This is an unforgettable biography from an American master.

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