William Goyen: 9 books

Proclaimed "one of the great American writers of short fiction" by the New York Times Book Review, William Goyen (1915-1983) had a quintessentially American literary career, in which national recognition came only after years of struggle to find his authentic voice, his audience, and an artistic milieu...

Goyen passes on traditional conventions of plot and character. The House of Breath is an address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in small Texas town, Charity. The novel is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life. This...

Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of sexuality, Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, religious revivalism, and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. The narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.

William Goyen's second novel finds Marietta McGee-Chavez and her friends and acquaintances populate a world that is as much imagination as it is reality. And within it, they experience dreams and reality, sexual desire and loneliness, triumph and defeat.Subtitles, A Romance, In a Farther Country is an...

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walk of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist...

Savata--a beautiful, fair-skinned young woman who leaves a career on the night club circuit to become high priestess of her own church in Brooklyn--is the creation of one of America's most original, evocative, and highly regarded writers. William Goyen offers a wonderful blend of bold satire and dignified pathos in this touching, funny, short novel.

Goyen's final collection of stories, putting together selections from his long career as well as some of his newer works. Published in tandem with a new novel after about a decade of publishing silence. The title story won an O.Henry Prize.

Part fable and part rhapsodic exploration of desire and loss, Half a Look of Cain bears Goyen's unmistakable artistic signature on every page. Told as a series of nested episodes, the novel is narrated alternately by a male nurse, his patient, and a lighthouse keeper. As boundaries blur and connections...

A non-fiction work by Goyen--his attempt to explain who Jesus Christ was utilizing Christ's own words.