Everything is Nice

Jane Bowles wrote very little: just one perfect novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and the dozen or so stories collected in this volume. But it was enough to establish a reputation as one of the twentieth century's most original fiction writers. From the title story where an American woman is led to a house in a 'blue moslem town' by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to Camp Cataract, a Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, Everything is Nice takes you into an edgy and exhilarating, tragicomic world. This beautifully produced volume includes all of Jane Bowles's stories, together with the fragments of two further novels, and three stories that originally formed a part of Two Serious Ladies, before the book was edited by Paul Bowles. The book also includes the full text of In the Summer House, and two other short plays, A Quarelling Pair and At the Jumping Bean. Together with Two Serious Ladies, it represents Jane Bowles's complete fictional output.