Prose

Although Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps better known as a masterful poet, she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as this centenary edition of her prose demonstrates. From her witty, unforgettable portraits of Marianne Moore and the Sitwells to her engaging childhood recollections of Canada and Massachusetts, her writing reflects a lifelong fascination with memory and travel, and her unique eye and ear for people and places.

This new volume - edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Lloyd Schwartz - includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Included here are her stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and - for the first time - the original draft of Brazil, the Life World Library volume she repudiated in its published version, as well as extensive selections from the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson. Here is a rich and revealing selection, and the indispensible companion to the poems.