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Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590174579
Pages: 136
Publication Date: August 16, 2011

The Pilgrim HawkA Love Story

by Glenway Wescott, introduction by Michael Cunningham

Paperback

This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and farcical, begins.

A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner’s The Bear as one of the finest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

Download the Reading Group Guide for The Pilgrim Hawk.glenway wescott by Glenway Wescott, introduction by Michael Cunningham

Praise

Among the treasures of 20th-century American literature.
—Susan Sontag

Truly a work of art, of the kind so rarely achieved or attempted nowadays.
—Christopher Isherwood

[In The Pilgrim Hawk] the reader is constantly being repositioned, constantly being forced to see something he didn't quite see before. Mr. Wescott's world is self-contained but precarious, and, like the real one, endlessly full of meaning.
—Howard Moss, The New Yorker

The author has created a strange, tense atmosphere, while telling the story with delicacy and charm.
Library Journal

"Glenway Wescott was part of a Midwestern movement in American literature during the first decades of this century-the era of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth.... [Wescott] remains an appealing and distinctive minor master.
The Washington Post Book World