Publisher's Synopsis
A modest beginning, but a powerful one. This early collection marks the debut of a voice that would reshape modern literature. Here, in three taut stories and ten spare, resonant poems, a young writer begins to find the form and force that would define a generation. The stories-spare and emotionally raw-speak of longing, misunderstanding, and the quiet tragedies of everyday life. A woman's yearning for love leads to devastation. A father's fall from grace casts a shadow over a boy's coming of age. A couple's fragile relationship dissolves in the stillness of a foreign town. Each is a study in restraint, and yet none are emotionally restrained. They reverberate with a sadness that is deeply human. The accompanying poems, experimental and quietly fierce, explore war, passion, solitude, and fleeting joy. They are fragments of experience rendered in direct, unpretentious language, hinting at the themes of loss and endurance that would later define an entire body of work. Together, these early pieces reveal a writer already fluent in the language of truth-brutal, tender, and exacting. They are the foundation stones of a remarkable literary career and a portrait of the artist before the fame, with his heart still on the page.
