Moise and the World of Reason

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The publication of a major work of fiction by Tennessee Williams - the most gifted playwright and poet of the human emotions of our time - is a major literary event. His gift for dialog, his shrewd instinct for phrase and language, and his unerring knowledge of the regions of soul where desire, regret and loneliness lie in wait for the traveller make this remakable novel a work as moving and powerful as his enduring plays - A Streetcar Namde Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.

At the center of Moise and the World of Reason is the need of three people for each other: Moise, an impoverished and quixotic young painter with a gift for unfinished canvassas; the narrator, a young man from Thelma, Alabama, who is determinied to be a distinguished writer; and Lance, the man whose intensity, strength and sensuality held them all togther while he lived, and whose absence gives the novel its strange and haunting power and pathos. For the subject of Tennessee Williams' novel is the need for love - a need which Lance once filled in the narrator and his new lover does not, and which Moise's never entirely fills for her. It is this need that propels them through a long and restless night in Greenwich Villiage - a night in which Moise gives a party to announce her retirement from "the world of reason"; in which the narrator loses his roommate, the "second love of his life"; and in which a lifetime of experience, hope, the loss of innocence and the rekindling of desire is exposed in a series of scenes and encounters so dramatic, moving and precise that only Tennesse Williams could have written them.

Erotic, sensual, comic, and totally convincing, Moise and the World of Reason is a major work by one of the most distinguised artists of Amercan literature.