Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms: Two Novels

From the Modern Librarys new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capotealso available are In Cold Blood, Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capotes extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffanys and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy. Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffanys shares not only the authors philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffanys; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged fatherwho is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.