Apartment in Athens (used) – Glenway Wescott
Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott / ISBN 9781590170816 / 296-page paperback from New York Review of Books Classics
Used copy, light shelfwear only.
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Like Wescott’s extraordinary novella The Pilgrim Hawk (which Susan Sontag described in The New Yorker as belonging “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature”), Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion—an account of political oppression and spiritual struggle that is also a parable about the costs of closeted identity.
Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) was the author of the novels The Grandmothers and Apartment in Athens, in addition to several collections of stories and essays. His life–as revealed in his published journals and a joint biography of him and his lover, Monroe Wheeler–has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years.
