Memoirs of a Midget
Walter de la Mare
Foreword by Alison Lurie
Take a Moment and read an excerpt from this book.
"Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget is one of the strangest and most enchanting works of fiction ever written. It is a tour de force: a grown man's fully imagined and convincing impersonation of a young woman between two and four feet tall." —from the Foreword by Alison Lurie
Miss M., the narrator of these fictional memoirs, is a diminutive young woman (though just how diminutive, the author never says) with a "passion for shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals." Miss M. tells of her early life as a dreamy orphan and, in particular, of her tempestuous twentieth year—in which she falls in love with a beautiful and ambitious full-sized woman and is courted by a male dwarf. Concluding that she must choose either to simply tolerate her difference or grow callous to it, Miss M. resolves to become independent by offering herself up as a spectacle in a circus.
"Sentences, pages, whole chapters cause us to catch our breath; we turn the leaves back a second, a third time to submit ourselves to the spell of a magic phrase." —Atlantic Monthly
"For centuries to come, this book will inspire imaginative people. Beyond all doubt, it will be an ingredient of future poetry." —Rebecca West
"After a long period of neglect de la Mare may be beginning to be seen as the remarkable writer that he is." —John Bayley, New York Review of Books
"Here is a great book." —New York Times Book Review
"It seems to me a perfect, utterly original novel, and no one but a poet could have written it. . . . The book is totally idiosyncratic and yet there isn't a line you couldn't identify yourself with." —Harry Mathews, author of Cigarettes
"It may be read with a great deal of simple enjoyment and then it sticks like a splinter in the mind." —Angela Carter, author of The Bloody Chamber
Read a review by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.
Read a review by Frank Wilson in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) wrote numerous novels, short stories, essays, and poems. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Memoirs of a Midget. Other major works include the children's novel, The Three Royal Monkeys, Henry Broken, and The Return.
Alison Lurie is the author of many highly praised novels as well as two collections of essays on children's literature, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups and Boys and Girls Forever. She has taught children's literature and folklore at Cornell University for many years.
His Monkey WifeJohn CollierIntroduction by Eva Brann
Trade Paper,
214 pp.,
$14.95 |
In the author's own words: "This is a strange book . . . an emotional melodrama, complete with a Medusa villainess, an honest simpleton of a hero, and an angelic if only anthropoid heroine, all functioning in the two dimensional world of the old Lyceum poster or the primitive fresco . . . where an angel may outsize a church, and where a man may marry a monkey on a foggy day." — . . . [read more] |