Benvenuto

by Keith Botsford

It has been said that Botsford writes "like an angel" and writers such as Mark Harris, Herbert Gold and W.G. Sebald have admired his fiction. These four stories are the product of a mature writer with an individual voice.

The present collection brings together two novellas and two stories from what one writer called his "renaissance" as a fiction writer. O BROTHER!, described as "extraordinarily direct and true", is the life of a con-artist infatuated with his mother, with sex and charm, and inhabiting a world of pure fantasy which reality always returns to destroy. OLGA AND SNOW tells of a Russian waif who is bedded by a series of extraordinary figures from the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, including a commissar for culture and a Nobel Prize dissident poet with a more than passing resemblance to Joseph Brodsky.

Of the two remaining stories, LA FRANCOISE is here published for the first time in English. The author describes it as a tribute to his friend Georges Simenon. The second, ALONG THE RIVER PLATE, is a tale of ambiguity and deception set in Peronist Argentina.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1961

About the author

Novelist, essayist, journalist, biographer, memoirist, teacher, translator, and editor.

See obituary at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/bo....