The Mountain Lion (New York Review Books Classics)
"Stafford's unusual, intense novel about a brother and sister who spend a fateful summer on their uncle's ranch in Colorado has never been forgotten by anyone who's read it since its publication in 1947. This handsome new paperback edition from New York Review Books includes Stafford's 1971 author's note and an afterword by Kathryn Davis." --The Oregonian"How could it be that Jean Stafford has vanished from view, remembered more for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling than her considerable accomplishments as a writer? Her 1970 Pulitzer Prize for "Collected Stories" was apparently no inoculation from the vagaries of literary fashion, and perhaps after languishing in out-of-print no man's land, this edition of "The Mountain Lion" will win Stafford new legions of readers. The novel, which appeared in 1947, is in many ways a coming-of-age story, centering on a precocious brother and sister who spend their summers at their uncle's Colorado ranch. Sounds simple enough, but Stafford's world is eerie and chilling -- though emotionally red hot, as boy and girl chafe against their suburban, silk-and-sherry life and yet find the freedom of the frontier, and the prospect of adulthood, almost impossible to bear." --Elizabeth Taylor,The Chicago Tribune"Stafford has a dry desert style — you feel the stillness and the heat in her writing, the swish of palm trees, voices of children, the sounds of sweeping beneath walnut trees, the whir of hummingbirds...Stafford can write a real nightmare, the kind in which everything looks ominous, words cause permanent scars and a character's one shot at happiness is dashed by his very own hands." --The Los Angeles Times“If not the best novel of the 1940s, The Mountain Lion is a very fine book indeed, a classic of childhood rage and bewilderment told in a superbly controlled colloquial prose." --Elaine Showalter“A mature and wise novel, a novel so utterly different from her first that it is  evident she need never imitate herself, as young novelists too often do after an  early success. Written with simplicity and often with astonishing power…The Mountain  Lionis likely to beguile many a reader into thinking that he has hold of merely  a shrewdly perspective and amusing novel of children, when what he really has in  his hand is a charge of psychological dynamite.” -Joseph Henry Jackson,San Francisco  Chronicle “Like Flaubert and Eudora Welty, Miss Stafford is a master of making the  objects in a room exhibit a dumb and eloquent presence…The Mountain Lionis one of  the best novels about adolescence in American literature.” -Guy Davenport,The New  York Times “It's a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind  in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” -Jonathan Yardley,The Washington Post “A subtly and brilliantly realized tragedy of adolescence” -Joyce  Carol Oates,The New York Times Book Review A “wonderful record of childhood and  adolescence…I do not know where to turn in contemporary fiction for a more wonderful  recording of the sights and smells, the emotions and values, the hates and passions  of childhood and youth…[a] beautifully modeled tale.” -Howard Mumford Jones, The  New York Times “a delicate, sharp story of childhood and adolescence.” -Timemagazine “The Mountain Lionhas all the form, design and sever selectivity of a controlled  and conscious work of art. Its characters are painfully real, interesting as individuals  and significant as representatives of various attitudes toward life.” -Orville Prescott,The New York Times “The Mountain Lionremains a brilliant achievement, an exploration  of adolescence to set beside Carson McCullers's masterworkThe Member of the Wedding.”  -Joyce Carol Oates,The New York Review of Books “The Mountain Lionis so good  in part because, along with splendid writing, it is filled with American lore-games,  songs and slang-and animated by the insatiable demands of its young heroine, Molly  Fawcett, as fiercely intelligent and impossible a person as was her creator.” -William  H. Pritchard,The New York Times Book Review “A psychological thriller about two  adolescents, a brother and sister, and of a hunt which has tragic results for them  both.” -William Murphy,The Los Angeles Times “It's riches are many-in language,  in irony, in insights into life's ambiguities.” -Paperbacks New and Noteworthy,The  New York Times “approaches the stature of a modern classic.” -The New York Post “The author manages to convey the sense of dark and rushing wings-darker for the  bright blue sky-which plunges the end of the book into unexpected horror.” -New York  Times Book Review “For the brutality and correctness of its ending, I think only  Cormac McCarthy'sBlood Meridiancompetes withThe Mountain Lion…among American literary  children, Ralph and Molly have peers only in Holden Caulfield, Scout and Jem Finch,  and Huckleberry Finn.” -Tin House “In the work of perhaps no other comparably youthful  author has there been recent evidence of equal insight and compassion.” -Jean Lehman,  The Philadelphia Inquirer “Miss Stafford is, fundamentally, out for much bigger  game than a mere couple of troubled kids. It is life itself-the painful state of  being human and conscious-that Miss Stafford's penetrating little story examines  and vilifies. For what Molly and Ralph suffer in exaggerated form and almost unremittingly  in the pages ofThe Mountain Lionis but the malaise which from time to time torments  us all-that recurrent sense of pain and apprehension which is a function, or at any  rate an inevitable by-product, of the state of consciousness itself.” -New York Herald  Tribune “Jean Stafford writes with the relentless and dazzling brilliance of an  avenging angel wielding a white-hot sword. She has a sound feeling for and great  appreciation of the simple ways of simple people.” -Florence Haxton Bullock,The  New York Hearld Tribune Book Review “Hard to match for subtlety and understanding…A  sharply focused study rather than a broad exploration of adolescence,written wittily,  lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language.”-The New Yorker A “positive artistic creation…a fine book.”-Newark News “written with sharp-edged  humor and compassionate understanding.”-The Washington Star  “Miss Stafford writes  with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements  are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending  afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of  evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible.”-Saturday Review “Miss Stafford holds the reader spellbound throughout the narrative. She creates  an intense atmosphere with a few simple phrases and characterizes her figures in  a masterly manner through the eyes of the children.” -Catholic World