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      The Memoirs of Hecate County

      by Edmund Wilson
      Published
      May 1995
      Main Genre
      General Fiction General Fiction
      Rating
      Pages
      411
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      About This Book

      An upper-middle-class intellectual narrates this classic collection of six stories exploring lust and love in mid-twentieth-century American society.

      "The devil has a field day in suburbia. The main scene of the story (when it is not Manhattan Island) is in the countryside somewhere on the commuters' cocktail circuit near New York. Outwardly it is realistic down to the last croquet set. But it is also obviously named for Hecate, that three-headed goddess of black magic, nightmares and the underworld." —The New York Times

      Controversial upon publication in 1946, Memoirs of Hecate County remained banned for more than a decade before being reissued. A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson's erotic and devastating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.

      "I have read your book Memoirs of Hecate County in one swallow. There are lots of wonderful things in it." —Vladimir Baokov

      "There is a true whiff of hell in Hecate County—in the low ceilings and cheap underwear of the sex idyll, the clothes and neuroses of the copulators. . . . After 1946, Hecate Counties would spread and multiply and set the new cultural tone. The suburban home would replace the city street as the theater of hopes; private fulfillment and not public justice would set the pace of the pursuit of happiness. Wilson foretold it, casting his fiction in the coming mode, of sexual candor, dark sardonic fantasy, and confessional fragment." —John Updike

      Genres & Themes

      Genres

      General Fiction

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      Browse the different covers, formats, and publication history for this title.

      Paperback

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      Trade Paperback
      First Edition May 1995 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0374524327
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      Paperback
      Jan 1959 David R. Godine Publisher ISBN 087923315X
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      Mass Market Paperback
      Jan 2001 Signet ISBN 0451020049
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      Trade Paperback
      May 2004 New York Review of Books ISBN 1590170938
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      Hardcover

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      Hardcover
      Jan 1979 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0374986568
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      eBook

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      eBook
      Nov 2019 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 146689962X
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      eBook
      Nov 2019 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN B07ZBTKCQ9
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      Large Print

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      Hardcover
      Aug 1990 Guild Large Print Books (UK) ISBN 1852900202
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