Readings.com.au: Truman Capote

Summer Crossing

Flame-haired Grady McNeil is beautiful, rich and defiant. Her privileged society life leaves her wanting, and excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking attendant. When Grady's mother and father leave her alone one summer in their New York penthouse, her secret affair intensifies and she is forced to make decisions that will alter her future indelibly. Truman Capote's recently discovered debut novel is a captivating portrayal of first love.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is both a masterpiece of journalism and a powerful crime thriller. Inspired by a 300-word article in The New York Times, Capote spent six years exploring and writing the story of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, his family and the two young killers who brutally murdered them. In Cold Blood created a genre of novelistic non-fiction and made Capote's name with its unflinching portrayal of a comprehensible and thoroughly human evil.

Breakfast At Tiffanys

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'.
'One of the twentieth century's most gorgeously romantic fictions.'
Daily Telegraph

In Cold Blood

Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. The book that made Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.
'The American dream turning into the American nightmare... a remarkable book.'
Tony Tanner, Spectator

Breakfast At Tiffany's

Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is a brilliant glimmer of the excitement of 40's New York. Holly Golightly - brashly beautiful with a slim black dress, a mysterious past and dark glasses over varicoloured eyes - entrances all the men she meets, including the young writer living above her, though her recklessness may yet catch up with her. Also containing three short stories, this edition shows the elegance and warmth of Capote's writing at its most flawless.

Music For Chameleons New Writing

At the centre of Music for Chameleons is Handcarved Coffins, a 'nonfiction novel' based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer. Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America, it offers chilling insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. Also in this volume are six short stories and seven 'conversational portraits' including a touching one of Marilyn Monroe, the 'beautiful child' and a hilarious one of a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.

Portraits And Observations: The Essays Of Truman Capote

Perhaps no twentieth century writer was so observant and elegant a chronicler of his times as Truman Capote. Whether he was profiling the rich and famous or creating indelible word-pictures of events and places near and far, Capote’s eye for detail and dazzling style made his reportage and commentary undeniable triumphs of the form.

Portraits and Observations is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to meditations about fame, fortune, and the writer’s art at the peak of his career, to the brief works penned during the isolated denouement of his life, these essays provide an essential window into mid-twentieth-century America as offered by one of its canniest observers. Included are such celebrated masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as "The Muses Are Heard" and the short nonfiction novel Handcarved Coffins, as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Isak Dinesen, Mae West, Marcel Duchamp, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe.

Among the highlights are "Ghosts in Sunlight: The Filming of In Cold Blood", "Preface to Music for Chameleons", in which Capote candidly recounts the highs and lows of his long career, and a playful self-portrait in the form of an imaginary self-interview. The book concludes with the author’s last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered "Remembering Willa Cather", Capote’s touching recollection of his encounter with the author when he was a young man at the dawn of his career.

Portraits and Observations puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote’s brilliance. Certainly, Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, "a stylist of the first quality." But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance.

Other Voices Other Rooms

After the death of his mother, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox is summoned to live with a father he has never met in a vast decaying mansion in rural Alabama, its baroque splendour now faded and tarnished. But when he arrives, his father is nowhere to be seen and Joel is greeted instead by his prim, sullen new stepmother Miss Amy and his debauched Cousin Randolph – living like spirits in the fragile decadence of a house full of secrets.

Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a story of hallucinatory power, vividly conjuring up the Gothic landscape of the Deep South and a boy's first glimpse into a mysterious adult world.

Summer Crossing

Grady - beautiful, rich, flame-haired, defiant - is the sort of girl people stare at across a room. The daughter of an important man, who people want to be introduced to. A girl to whom people sense something is going to happen.

But the privileged society life of parties, debutantes and dresses leaves her wanting more than her parents and conventional sister Apple have in mind for her. Excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking attendant. And when Grady's mother and father leave her alone for the first time in their New York penthouse one summer, their secret affair intensifies. As a heatwave envelops the city, Grady gets in deeper and deeper and cares less and less about the consequences. Soon, though, she will be forced to make decisions - choices that will forever affect her future once the long, sultry summer of 1945 comes to an end.

Complete Stories

Passionate, perceptive and eloquent, the short stories of Truman Capote are among the greatest works of twentieth century American fiction. This new collection gathers them all together for the first time: from early, eerie Southern Gothic tales such as 'Miriam' and 'The Headless Hawk', to the brilliantly evocative 'Children On Their Birthdays' and the tenderly autobiographical 'A Christmas Memory' – an affectionate portrayal of Capote's own Alabama upbringing. Whether describing the Deep South of his childhood, or considering city life with the penetrating gaze of an outsider – as in 'Among the Paths to Eden' and the hitherto unpublished 'The Bargain' these stories rank among Capote's finest work: acutely observed tales from a unique and brilliant mind.

Answered Prayers

A brilliantly malicious expose of the literary jet-set, when Answered Prayers first appeared in excerpts in Esquire magazine it outraged Capote's society friends, who recognized thinly veiled portraits of themselves in these scandalous fictional 'memoirs'.

P.B. Jones is the amoral, bisexual protagonist of this great, unfinished novel, who discovers that bed-hoping rather than literary ability is the way to get published. Living by his wits and his charm, Jones makes his way through the exotic boudoirs of the glitterati - only to discover that the prayers that are answered cause more pain than those that remained ignored.