New York Mosaic

"On their first publication, Isabel Bolton's novellas won high praise from such reviewers as Edmund Wilson and Diana Trilling (who in 1946 called her `the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years'). Highly poetic, evocative stories of city life, the characters in these novellas are mirrored by the complexities of New York itself. Out of print for many years, New York Mosaic, brings together the finest fiction from this unique and timeless writer.

In all three of these novels, voices move the stories - each carefully constructed narrative is built by the layering of conversation, perception, and inner monologue onto lyrical descriptions of a vibrating New York City. In Do I Wake or Sleep, the lives of two Americans (a journalist and an alcoholic novelist) and a beautiful European refugee intersect for just twenty-four hours as a witty contrast of American and European culture unfolds. In The Christmas Tree, the elderly Mrs. Danforth is celebrating the holidays with her grandson, the boy's mother, and new step-father, when her homosexual son, the boy's father, appears on the scene with his lover and the story draws to its tragic conclusion. In Many Mansions, the voice is that of Margaret Sylvester, in her eighties, living alone in a New York hotel room. She decides, after considerable deliberation, to reread an unpublished manuscript about her life and her poignant and sometimes tragic story is communicated with astonishing brevity and immediacy.

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