At 17, Nan wants to leave the family farm and go to study. Caught between her powerful mother and yielding, drunken father, she absorbs the tensions of their divided household and dotes on her new gelding, a gift from her father. When a sudden accident leaves the horse blind, Nan's mother insists he must be put down, initiating a power struggle that brings the family's conflicts explosively to the fore. First published in 1938, The Crazy Hunter is an electrifying short novel-sharply observed, psychologically astute and morally complex. Written in lush, entrancing prose, it is the finest work by a significant modernist writer.

"I think my Crazy Hunter is the best thing I've ever done," Kay Boyle wrote to her sister Joan in 1939, two weeks after she had finished writing it. Twenty years later she wrote to a friend, it "remains one of my best, I think." This stunning short novel portrays a family--an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father--and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him. Part of Boyle's "British" period (based on her year's stay in Devon), The Crazy Hunter is a charged inquiry into family relations and moral choice.

Kay Boyle's Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience.

From Publishers Weekly Boyle's memorable novel, first published in 1936 and long out of print, and set in the Austrian town of Feldbruck from February to July of 1934, is at once a love story and a chilling political drama. Romance blooms between Prochaska, the resident doctor at the town hospital's ward for infectious diseases, and Pendennis, a young, married American tourist. The attraction between the two is immediate and potent, but as their involvement deepens, Pendennis becomes aware of Prochaska's work for the Nazi party, which many Feldbruck citizens cling to in the hope that it will rescue Austria from economic depression. The lovers' clash is as emphatic as their affinity; as spring wears on, Pendennis's antipathy grows, until she declares to Prochaska that "you take your orders, you swallow it all down along with your pride and your sense or whathaveyou One day they're going to put a pretty little uniform on you . . . and say, 'Now you run along to war, dear,' and won't that be a lot of fun?" The collapse of the affair seems as inevitable as the tragic, impending war. The novel is reprinted here with an introduction in which Burton Hatlen of the University of Maine elucidates why Boyle's sympathetic view of Prochaska does not signify support of fascism, and with a brief, illuminating afterword by Boyle.

One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children's books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time. Kay Boyle shared the first issue of This Quarter with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, expressed her struggles with poetry to William Carlos Williams and voiced warm admiration to Katherine Anne Porter, fled WWII France with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, socialized with the likes of James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett, and went to jail with Joan Baez. The letters in this first-of-its-kind collection, authorized by Boyle herself, bear witness to a transformative era illuminated by genius and darkened by Nazism and the Red Scare. Yet they also serve as milestones on the journey of a woman who possessed a gift for intense and enduring friendship, a passion for social justice, and an artistic brilliance that earned her inclusion among the celebrated figures in her ever-expanding orbit.