Author Description

An anguished voice inhabits the stories collected in Had I a Hundred Mouths; it is the voice of crazed outsiders that William Goyen knew from his childhood in East Texas. Like his contemporaries Flannery O?Connor and Carson McCullers, Goyen's writing is deeply rooted in the myths and spells of his birth place: 'Those Texas wetlands are my wildness. They have haunted me and become my place in all my work.' In Goyen's writing, these magical, intense experiences are expressed in a magical prose whose rhythm refracts the brutal isolation of his characters. Had I a Hundred Mouths makes available for the first time to the British reader some of the great short stories of the twentieth century.