The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story [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.“Among this century’s finest English-language novellas.”
—Samuel R. Delaney

“The ever-astonishingPilgrim Hawkbelongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view.”
—Susan Sontag

“[Wescott’s] pulling of the rug of surety from under the reader’s feet is nothing less than what happens to a person proceeding through life. [In the book] I find a deeper, sadder truth: the truth of never being able to get to the bottom of it, of any of it. Of love. Of marriage. Of sex. Of this life itself, so full of appetite and thinking.”
—Jeffrey Eugenides,Lost Classics

“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 and precarious, and like the real one, endlessly full of meaning.”
—HowardMmoss,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 lc"