Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Two Serious Ladies

Author: Jane Bowles, Sheila Heti

Narrator: Kim Niemi

Unabridged: 7 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/26/2025


Synopsis

Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated modernist Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip off their propriety and descend into debauchery.

The book's two serious ladies want to break away from the constraints of being themselves. Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself falling in love with a prostitute and descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars. Miss Goering abandons her family for an austere island existence, only to yield to a series of increasingly sordid encounters with strange men.

At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience; the listener transformed by the devastating wit, strange clarity, and lack of nicety with which Jane Bowles vivisects society and women's place in it.

This new edition weds Bowles's daring and her authority as we restore her to her rightful place as an unparalleled modernist writer and thinker.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on March 22, 2020

This novel appears to have been written by someone who has not the faintest idea of what a novel actually is, who has overheard someone describing a novel very poorly once and thought ah, I must do that. And it further appears that the author has only the remotest notion of what human beings are lik......more

Goodreads review by Jesse on January 04, 2022

THOUGHTS ON A RE-READ: As I had posited in my initial review from 2016 below, I fully expected to 01) feel an inexplicable need to return to this sooner than later, and 02) this inimitably odd novel would totally click for me knowing what I was getting into from the start. Both of these things came......more

Goodreads review by Brodolomi on August 29, 2020

Dugo se nisam ovoliko smejao čitajući neku knjigu. Za razliku od mučnih i tužnih scena u književnosti, gde se čitaoci uglavnom mogu lako usaglastiti u ustisku, humor je neuhvatljiva kategorija i zahteva poklapanje senzibiliteta između pisca i čitaoca – jednostavno, nisu smešne svima iste stvari. Ovo......more