Evan Connell

The Diary of a Rapist

A Novel

This unnerving work is a contemplation of the middle–class existence in a changing world, narrated by an unstable man held hostage by his deteriorating mental state.

The story begins with the unhappy marriage of junior clerk Earl Summerfield to the much older Bianca. Feeling victimized by his cold wife and mocking superiors at work, Earl decides to keep a diary, a chronicle of his apparently crumbling marital relations, the paranoia and abuses he is seemingly forced to tolerate at work, and the world around him going to pieces in 1960's San Francisco. What he sees, what he says, what he wants to say – everything swarms his head and consciousness, inciting and fueling fantasies of love, ambition, and avenging the violent crimes with which he was become obsessed. His angry and unstable mind alternates between feelings of apprehension and disgust, and exploring his own violent, sexual fantasies, and Earl takes action first by breaking into other peoples' houses and then fixating on various women, before settling with utmost and troubling certainty on the local beauty queen, Mara St. John's.

Francisco Goya

Life and Times

The author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt probes the mind of the Spanish painter, reconstructing the violent, repressive Spain he called home and charting his powerful influence on Western art.

This biography of Francisco Goya breaks the mold--recounting with stunning immediacy the uncommon genius behind the renowned Spanish painter. Darkly brilliant and casually masterful in turn, Francisco Goya changed art forever. During the days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya painted royalty, street urchins, and demons with the same brush, bringing his own distinctive touch to each. This unusual man and his ghastly times are the perfect subject for Evan S. Connell, one of our greatest and least conventional writers. Introducing a wealth of detail and a cast of comic characters--a motley group of dukes, queens, and artists, as lewd and incorrigible a crew as history has ever produced--Connell has conjured Goya's life with wit, erudition, and a sparkling imagination.

Points for a Compass Rose

"We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls 'the nerve for excellence.' He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience...

"Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note–taker's [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread—any thread—follow it, and lo, it traces a pattern. . . you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they 'expression:' they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect...

"These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible. . . their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery."—Annie Dillard, Harper