Breakfast at tiffany's & other voices, other rooms - Truman Capote

From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote--also available are In Cold Blood, Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capote's extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy.

Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite.

The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany's shares not only the author's philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties.

For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany's; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.

Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father--who is nowhere to be found.

Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl.

Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.