Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ... 'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff 'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing 'I love this novel.' Patricia Lockwood She would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead. Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire - and as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . . 'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles 'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam 'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley 'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate whole lives but also convey with an elegant economy of words the sense of the place and time in which her protagonists find themselves. This volume also includes the acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form.

Two kids growing up in a genteel suburb of Los Angeles, Ralph and his younger sister, Molly, are independent-minded and highly imaginative and more than a little wild. They have no patience with the evasive politeness and mincing words of their mother and older sisters, so they're delighted when they're sent for the summer to the Colorado mountain ranch of their uncle Claude. Initially the children feel liberated by this encounter with nature at its most ruggedly spectacular and demanding. Soon, however, Ralph begins to sense, not without anxiety, the call and challenge of impending manhood, while Molly, for her part, burns both with the ambition of becoming a writer and the fear of being left behind in childhood. Neither suspects that tragedy may be the cost of coming of age.
Elaine Showalter recently wondered whether "The Mountain Lion" wasn't simply the best American novel of the 1940s. Certainly this beautifully written novel about the death of innocence, with its two vulnerable and yet deeply appealing central characters and its gorgeous descriptions of the Rocky Mountains, is as gripping, offbeat, emotionally resonant, and plain heartbreaking today as when it first appeared more than half a century ago.