- Truman Capote and the Swans
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- Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
Capote, Truman. Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. First Edition. 1987. Editor’s Note by Joseph M. Fox. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition.
Truman Capote commented to his friend and colleague Donald Windham, “Well, even if I never finish Answered Prayers, it’s better known than most books that are published.” Windham responded that Capote had done it again. In Cold Blood might have been the first nonfiction novel, but Answered Prayers was an even more innovative category of novel: the unwritten one. There was some speculation that Answered Prayers was finished and in a storage locker at a Greyhound bus station or that it had been swiped by a one of Truman’s seedy friends. Capote’s editor tends to think that unpublished chapters were indeed written but destroyed by Capote himself, considering them beneath his talent. Whatever the case, this book includes the chapters that had been published in Esquire, a discordant but tantalizing mix of beautiful writing and tabloid gossip—an otherwise perfect soufflé was ruined by triple the amount of salt.
“There is no plot—the only unifying element is a tone of profound disenchantment—and he has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction, which is the fashioning of a seamless narrative out of disparate characters and unrelated deeds. ‘La Côte Basque’ is not great art, but it is superb craftsmanship, storytelling at its most useful.”
--Truman Capote Biographer Gerald Clarke, on Answered Prayers