Join us for a discussion of Jane Bowles' visionary feminist writing and get the brand-new re-issue of two of her books!About this Event
Event guidelines:
- Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
- Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/H0BHSwbm3RA
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
Celebrate the life and work of visionary feminist writer Jane Bowles with the reissues of TWO SERIOUS LADIES, her sole novel, and PLAIN PLEASURES, a collection of short stories.
Two Serious Ladies:
Jane Bowles’s avant-garde study of women breaking free from the bonds of convention is itself a master class in liberation from the constraints of everyday thinking, form, and feeling.
Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip themselves of propriety and descend into debauchery—and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.
Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars, while Miss Goering engages in increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience—and the reader transformed by the devastating wit and strange clarity with which Bowles writes of society and women’s place in it.
Plain Pleasures:
A restored collection of the short fiction of an overlooked genius whose visionary style and modernist experiments with form we’re only just beginning to understand.
In these uncanny and insidious tales, Jane Bowles presents an incendiary and groundbreaking vision of the mad possibilities of literary modernism. From “Everything Is Nice,” where an American woman is led to a house in a “blue Moslem town” by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to “Camp Cataract,” a tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread set in Colorado, these stories are a bewildering, headlong plunge into the jagged, fever-dream world of Jane Bowles.
And for the first time ever, this collection includes the excised sections of Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies (which was originally Three Serious Ladies).
Jane Bowles wrote only one novel, a play, and just over a dozen short stories. But these were enough to establish her reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most original fiction writers. Born in New York City in 1917, she later married the author Paul Bowles. At the age of forty, she suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 selection, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Senior Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.
Lynne Tillman's novels include Weird Fucks; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK, 2021). Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67, photographs by Stephen Shore; What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; and Mothercare, an autobiographical book-length essay on caregiving. Her recent books are THRILLED TO DEATH, selected stories. and THE MYSTERY OF PERCEPTION, a book-length conversation with Taylor Lewandowski. In early 2026, a collection of her art and culture essays PAYING ATTENTION, will be published by David Zwirner Books.
Ann Stephenson is a writer and the founder & editor of Tent Editions, an independent press focused on poetry and alternative print projects. She serves as a readings curator for the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) in Cherry Grove and is the founder & curator of the Readings at Parkside series at The Parkside Lounge in NYC, which has featured artists and writers such as Cynthia Carr, Eileen Myles, Lucy Sante, Moyra Davey, and more. She was included in Wallpaper* Magazine's USA 400 list — their annual roster of the voices defining creative America in 2025. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in Poetry, her publications include Wirework, Adventure Club, and The Poles. Her poems have appeared in Across the Margin, Brooklyn Rail, The Recluse, and Sal Mimeo, as well as the anthology Like Musical Instruments: 83 Contemporary American Poets by John Sarsgard and Larry Fagin (Broadstone Books). She lives between New York City and Fire Island.
Event Venue
Books Are Magic Montague, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, United States
USD 10.89 to USD 37.02
