Novels
- Chasm (2004)
Collections
Non fiction
- Birthday (1987)
- Between Lives (2001)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Dorothea Tanning Books Overview
Chasm
A Surrealist novel in the vein of Angela Carter, about love and beauty and dark secrets. Played out like the command of an oracle are the events that stain one night in the improbable setting of this desert tale. Rearing its impudent architecture like insult on a landscape of quiet beauty is Windcote, ‘its very name a masquerade,’ where inhabitants and guests find themselves driven by obsessions and confusions they have never faced before. Here doors open and close and open again. They hide, release, reveal, and ruin. In this web of tangled imperatives is the child, Destina, untouched by the fevers and failures around her. Her own world is outside in the mystery locked canyon where, for the time of this story, she seems to find her own truth
Birthday
Clean, tight book. First hand account of a major artist of the twentieth century and the wife of the surrealist painter, Max Ernst. French flaps. 185pp.
Between Lives
The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists; a twentieth century fairy tale, lovingly remembered and luminously told. Fourteen years ago, the artist Dorothea Tanning published Birthday, a collection of reminiscences. Now she has expanded it into a memoir of her journey through the last century as confidant, collaborator, and muse to some of its most inspired minds and personalities: a diverse assemblage that ranges from the fathers of dada and surrealism to Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Mir , James Merrill, and many more. At its center is the relationship, tenderly rendered, between Tanning and her famed husband, the enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst. Whether recalling the poignant presence of her friend Joseph Cornell or simply the facades along a Venice canal, ‘their filmy reflections fluttering in the dirty canal like fragile altar cloths hung out to dry,’ Tanning’s writing is beguiling, wry, and shot through with the same eye for pregnant detail and immanent magic that marks her art.
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