From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover
classics by Truman Capote--also available are In Cold Blood, Portraits
and Observations, and The Complete Stories
Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from
Truman Capote's extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular
novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the
debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy.
Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his
favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast
at Tiffany's shares not only the author's philosophy of freedom but
also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi
and head for Tiffany's; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid
"that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets."
Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after
losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live
with his estranged father--who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel
meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant
little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence,
this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures
and the colorful language of its time and place.
