A Hasty Bunch

Book excerpt: The World Of A Writer Who Told It The Way It Really Was A woman whose sexual candor shocks her Midwestern town...an adolescent farm boy learning a shattering lesson in love...a restless girl playing with passion in Paris...a tormented human triangle in a Texas border town ... a trio of American girls following their very different paths to womanhood.. .an expatriate in the South of France caught on a merry-go-round of dreamlike pleasure and nightmare pain... All are part of an unforgettable human panorama that stretches from California to Europe, and ranges from the most elemental levels of existence to the jaded heights of sophistication. Here is the greatest work of fiction by a writer who was a prized member of the circle that included Hemingway and Joyce--a writer who now at last can be seen as the amazingly prophetic genius he was.