Books : Memoirs of Hecate County (New York Review Books Classics)
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by: Edmund Wilson
List Price: $15.95Amazon.com's Price: $12.44 You Save: $3.51 (22%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9781590170939
ISBN: 1590170938
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 472
Publication Date: September 30, 2004
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: September 30, 2004
Sales Rank: 796835
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, 'The Princess with the Golden Hair,' is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson's book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American literature: an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Forgettable Memoirs
First I encountered Vladimir Nabokov's gentle, sad and funny novel PNIN, then DEAR BUNNY, DEAR VOLODYA: THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS. Because I had found Nabokov so very enjoyable to read and because he thought highly of Edmund Wilson, I was determined to read some of the latter's works. I shall still get around to some of Wilson's non-fiction works, but MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY has convinced me that Wilson is not among the great fiction writers of American literature.
MEMOIRS consists ... Read More
Rating:  - Pedagogy, erudition and the focus on the canvas?????
I know too little to critique this book - a book is like a painting as we turn the pages the picture gets brighter and brighter. Most of the time the picture is incomplete and then it is our job to imagine the completion. In this canvas there are the back ground colors (in musical terms these are noises) and there are the primary characters over that background. It is important that the artiste do not mix up too much of the back ground with the primary focuses. In this book the back ground overpowers ... Read More
Rating:  - The Critic as Writer
"I took to walking in the evenings on Fourteenth Street, which had a certain animation and variety. I got to like the big-hipped cat-faced women of the photographs shown as lures out in front of the burlesque show; the announcements of moving picture palaces bejeweled with paste-bright lights; the little music shops that had radios blasted into the street." That of course is Wilson describing a slice of Manhattan during the Depression Era from his magnificent novel, Princess With the Golden Hair, which ... Read More
Rating: - Ascerbic and Incisive
I had recently read and loved _To the Finland Station_, Wilson's great non-fiction work treating the history of revolutionary thought in Europe. I had wanted to read something else of his and decided to read MoHC largely because of its infamous reputation.
(For those who don't know, MoHC was the subject of one of the pivotal battles over obscenity in literature. Although tame by today's standards, it was too frank about sexuality to get past the censors of the time. The Supreme Court upheld Doubleday's ... Read More
Rating: - Unpleasant
The five yarns in this book, loosely linked, are very engaging and captivating - even seductive. But in the end I hated them. It's just that the first person character is a male who takes liberties in his relationships and then bristles at suggested whiffs of engagement of his partner or partners with other people - even if the implied infidelity is far from established. I find it very hard not to identify the character with Edmund Wilson himself, and then it's so hard to avoid a real repugnance for the man and the ... Read More
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