Pilgrim Hawk

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Towers, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in-with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and farcical, begins. A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner's The Bear as one of the finest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

Reviews

Among this centurys finest English-language novellas.
Samuel R. Delaney

The ever-astonishing Pilgrim Hawk belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view.
Susan Sontag

[Wescotts] pulling of the rug of surety from under the readers feet is nothing less than what happens to a person proceeding through life. [In the book] I find a deeper, sadder truth: the truth of never being able to get to the bottom of it, of any of it. Of love. Of marriage. Of sex. Of this life itself, so full of appetite and thinking.
Jeffrey Eugenides, Lost Classics

The reader is constantly being repositioned, constantly being forced to see something he didnt quite see before. Mr. Wescotts world is self-contained and precarious, and like the real one, endlessly full of meaning.
HowardMmoss, The New Yorker

The author has created a strange, tense atmosphere, while telling the story with delicacy and charm.
Library Journal

Glenway Wescott was part of a Midwestern movement in American literature during the first decades of this century-the era of Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie, Willa Cathers My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis Main Street, and O.E. Rolvaags Giants in the Earth.... [Wescott] remains an appealing and distinctive minor master.
The Washington Post Book World

Author Bio

Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) was the author of the novels The Grandmothers and Apartment in Athens, in addition to several collections of stories and essays. His life-as revealed in his published journals and a joint biography of him and his lover, Monroe Wheeler-has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years. Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days. He lives in New York.