Why read The House of Breath?

Book cover of The House of Breath

Book description

Readers can now rediscover one of William Goyen's most important works in this restoration of the original text. The House of Breath eschews traditional conventions of plot and character presentation. The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked The House of Breath as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Reginald Gibbons

Author

William Goyen’s The House of Breath—a relatively short, lyric, novel—is a unique creation.

Set in the early 20th century in small-town Texas, it portrays a family of misfits and an almost supernatural world in which a deep well and a river narrate two of the chapters, while other chapters are told in a different voice.

In the family, each of its four wayward grown children is a remarkably distinct character. They differ in their sexuality, and one of the main dramas they have in common is their feeling of wanting to leave the small town in which they were…

From Reginald's list on characters’ life of feeling and cultural context.