Prose

Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not as well-known as her poetry, but she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer, too, as the publication of her letters has shown. Her stories often border on memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volume--edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and Bishop scholar 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 famous as well as her lesser-known 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 the relevant correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson while the latter was writing the first book-length critical study of Bishop's work.