Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Paperback 804: The Grass is Singing / Doris Lessing (Bantam 1045)

Paperback 804: Bantam 1045 (1st ptg, 1952)

Title: The Grass Is Singing
Author: Doris Lessing
Cover artist: Fletcher Martin

Yours for: $15

Bant1045

Best things about this cover:
  • OK, there are several remarkable things about this cover, but I'm somehow most struck by the "Painted by" credit! Attribution! Credit! So useful! Why aren't all paperback covers like this!?
  • If you want an iconic picture for "The White Gaze," Here You Go!
  • Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature, so I assume the writing quality here is a grade or two above "Mandingo."

Bant1045bc

Best things about this back cover:
  • "Mounting tensions" WINK WINK
  • "The one sin no white woman in Africa dares" … based on the cover, I'm betting on "Sloth."
  • Technically "Brave New World" had already come, twenty years earlier. Still, I love how excited this book is.

Page 123~

Then followed a time of dull misery: not the sharp bouts of unhappiness that were what had attacked her earlier. Now she felt as if she were going soft inside at the core, as if a soft rottenness was attacking her bones.

The horrible days before Boniva.

~RP

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This was Lessing's first novel, from the 1950's. She wrote more complex works in her later career.