{"title":"Coleman Dowell","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"the-grass-dies-rare-book-coleman-dowell-1692702226ada","title":"The Grass Dies","description":"1968. 199 pages. White pictorial dust jacket over brown cloth. Pages are lightly tanned and thumbed at the edges, with light foxing. Binding has remained firm. Boards are a little rub worn, slight she","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50080549863697,"sku":"1692702226ADA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1692702226ADA_1.jpg?v=1722905289"},{"product_id":"the-houses-of-children-collected-stories-book-coleman-dowell-9781555840433","title":"The houses of children: Collected stories","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50155825955089,"sku":"CIN1555840434VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50390238757137,"sku":"CIN1555840434G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1555840434.jpg?v=1750717985"},{"product_id":"island-people-book-coleman-dowell-9781564780935","title":"Island People","description":"In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50381513752849,"sku":"CIN1564780937G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037551427857,"sku":"NIN9781564780935","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51520334397713,"sku":"GOR004169413","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52683253973265,"sku":"NLS9781564780935","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52997578916113,"sku":"CIN1564780937A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1564780937.jpg?v=1751213441"},{"product_id":"white-on-black-on-white-book-coleman-dowell-9781852421601","title":"White on Black on White","description":"Like James Balwin?s Another  Coutry, White on Black on White, Coleman Dowell?s last book, is about the collision of race and sex. Edgar Cayce, a black policeman, is the central figure of the novel.  We read Cayce?s memoir - in fact written by the narrator who is white whilst Cayce is black, gay whislt Cayce is straight.  Cayce himself approve of the narrator?s impersonation: ?there isn?t a lot I?d object to or change...? Which is not surprising since Dowell?s point is that the essence of black is given in its interdependence with the other (white) and vice versa. In White on Black on White, Coleman Dowell has written an ambitious  novel whose brilliance resides in the perfect fit between formal innovations and what is being said.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50560392462609,"sku":"GOR002255736","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51421213032721,"sku":"GOR005000002","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852421606.jpg?v=1751425739"},{"product_id":"star-bright-lie-book-coleman-dowell-9781564780225","title":"Star-Bright Lie","description":"A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to \"make it\" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's \"Golden Boy, \" a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: \"his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known\" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50828920684817,"sku":"CIN1564780228G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037484876049,"sku":"NIN9781564780225","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52666375930129,"sku":"NLS9781564780225","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1564780228.jpg?v=1751119016"},{"product_id":"too-much-flesh-and-jabez-book-coleman-dowell-9780916583217","title":"Too Much Flesh and Jabez","description":"Coleman Dowell's \"Southern Gothic\" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a \"perverse tale\" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of \"an old woman's revenge,\" Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes \"Too Much Flesh and Jabez\" a memorable achievement.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50948529783057,"sku":"CIN091658321XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009449427217,"sku":"NIN9780916583217","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53043023741201,"sku":"GOR004077257","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/091658321X.jpg?v=1750850830"},{"product_id":"coleman-dowell-songbook-book-coleman-dowell-9780991121168","title":"The Coleman Dowell Songbook","description":"\u003cp\u003eColeman Dowell composed most of the songs in this collection between 1942-1962. Although best known as a novelist, Dowell's early career in music spanned two decades, first as a composer for the Dumont Television show Once Upon a Tune, and later as the composer of the musical \u003cem\u003eThe Tattooed Countess\u003c\/em\u003e, based on the novel by Carl Van Vechten. Though the songs were highly praised when the musical opened on Broadway at the Barbizon-Plaza Theater on May 3, 1961, the show folded within a few weeks.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now housed in several archives, including the Fales Library at NYU and the New York Public Library, the songs in this collection are available in print for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51011092152593,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51011095363857,"sku":"NIN9780991121168","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0991121163.jpg?v=1750948777"},{"product_id":"mrs-october-was-here-book-coleman-dowell-9780811205191","title":"Mrs. October Was Here","description":"Mrs. Septimus October, a lady of vastwealth whose hobby is revolution descends with her mysterious entourageto stage her great experiment--one aimed at ridding the world of hatredby focusing it on one single individual and destroying him. Her strangecadre of agents grows amid surprising, even sinister circumstances. Herbright and terrible revolution, however, takes a turn she had notanticipated, and the novel reveals itself as a ferocious, many-leveledfable.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51324512600337,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51324515516689,"sku":"CIN0811205193G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0811205193.jpg?v=1751043352"},{"product_id":"houses-of-children-book-coleman-dowell-9781564782571","title":"Houses of Children","description":"-- First paperback edition. -- A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. A collection culled from Coleman Dowell's entire career, The Houses of Children displays the wide range of his talent in a dense and beautifully stylistic prose. -- Coleman Dowell is the author of five novels including Island People and Mrs. October Was Here, and a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which won an Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. -- First published by Weidenfeld \u0026amp; Nicolson (1987).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52682892050705,"sku":"NLS9781564782571","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751478391057,"sku":"NIN9781564782571","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781564782571.jpg?v=1762319271"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-coleman-dowell.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}