Bibliographical Description
88.06.W051: Williams – Breaking and Entering
BREAKING | [double wave motif 10.5 x 47 mm] and | ENTERING | [triple wave motif 15 x 47 mm] | JOY | WILLIAMS | VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES | Vintage Books A Division of Random House | New York
144 leaves, pp. [6] 1–2 3-127 128–130 131-279 [3]
A Vintage Contemporaries Original, June 1988, First Edition
Contents: π1a author photo with blurbs, π1b ‘ALSO BY | JOY WILLIAMS’, π2a half-title, π2b blank, π3a title, π3b imprint, 1-279 Breaking and Entering: 1-127 ‘[triple wave motif 14 x 43 mm] I | Then the strangest questions | are asked, which no human | being could answer: Why there | is only one such animal; why | I rather than anybody else | should own it, whether there | was ever an animal like it | before and what would happen | if it died, whether it feels | lonely, why it has no children, | what it is called, etc. | — Franz Kafka, “Cross Breeze”’, 128 blank, 129-278 ‘[triple wave motif 14 x 43 mm] II | It is living and ceasing to live | that are imaginary solutions. | Existence is elsewhere. | — André Breton’, 279 about the author, χ1b blank, χ2a Vintage Contemporaries order form, χ2b Vintage Contemporaries list.
Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Rick Lovell; interior author photo by Thomas Victor.
Copyright: © 1981, 1988. ISBN: 0-394-75773-4. Price: $6.95. Breaking and Entering was first published by Vintage Contemporaries 1988.
Copies: JDP 1.1 (two copies)
Blurbs
- (front cover) Breaking & Entering is in the company of Céline, Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood….Joy Williams demolishes other writers. – James Salter
- Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous. An exhilarating cast of characters reflects this search, which is not just for home, but for self.
- This compassionate and original book is about love and loneliness and courage in the new wilderness of our atomized society. It is also funny, awful and gruesomely Floridian without sacrificing its seriousness. Joy Williams is as fine a writer as you heard she was. – Thomas McGuane
- An ominous and enthralling novel…truly significant fiction, of which there is not very much around. Breaking and Entering reminds me again that life is short; it is also very wide. – Jim Harrison
- To put it simply, Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation. For her, the human personality is of most interest and most truth when it is under the most extreme pressure….This notion of truth emerges in Joy Williams’s work in a complete Americanness of setting, language, and psychology that I find to be of great beauty and meaning. – Harold Brodkey