The truth-stretching memoir of a great literary fantasist

“Mr. Prokosch’s gift is one which strikes me as astonishing. It is rich and immediate . . . the talent of a real visionary, and often magical.” —W. B. Yeats VOICES Frederic Prokosch Introduction by Kathryn Davis Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch's long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the "middle-class and fancy dullness" of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired. In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with Voices—a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. Voices, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch's portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall's wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W. H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his ability to capture these artists' cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir. For three days only, Voices is available at 25% off. BUY THE BOOK You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe