Julia and the Bazooka
short stories

This Edition: American First Edition
Published 1975
Alfred A. Knopf
New York

Originally published 1970
Peter Owen Limited
London, U.K.

Here are fifteen startling stories that reflect the weird, thrilling realm into which this brilliant English writer's dangerous life and powerful artistic drive propelled her - thirty years of seesawing stability and chaos: constant drug addiction, suicide attempts, productive work in painting and editing, two marriages and a son, long sojourns in mental hospitals, widely admired novels and short stories.

Her stories penetrate the black holes of human consciousness and perception, a region of hypnotic games and seductive hallucinations where everything is animate, where the vertiginous panic and tough pride of the outcast merge with a tender, tranquil appeal to what is beautiful and lasting.

• A young woman, mesmerized by speeding in high-powered cards with her lover, enters the fearless nomadic, "elegant" world of race-car drivers. She is co-driver, passenger, mascot.....
• An eccentric painter, living alone on the outskirts of a jungle, hallucinates a leopard who comes to her each night, smelling of sunshine, freedom, crushed leaves.....
• A brilliant doctor and his mistress plan compulsively for the Mercedes they will buy and escape in, until a call from his wife lures them out to the street, to the bizarre culmination of their game....
• A woman, driving through the dreadful fog, is seized with a vision of faces like Japanese dragon-masks, bodies like dummies stuffed with clothes - and slides into consciousness in the office of an inspector accusing her of homicide....
• The ghost of an old lover occupies a woman completely, waylaying her in tree-lined squares, subway stations, libraries, shops, waiting for her in other countries, in hotels and clinics....
• And in the title story, "Julia is a little girl with long straight hair..... Julia is also a quiet schoolgirl who does not make many friends..... Julia is also a young bride in a white dress, holding a sheaf of roses in one hand and in the other a very small flat white satin bag containing a lace-edged handkerchief scented with Arpege and a plastic syringe....."

. The Old Address
. A Visit
. Fog
. Experimental
. World of Heroes
. The Mercedes
. Clarita
. Out and Away
. Now and Then
. High in the Mountains
. Among the Lost Things
. The Zebra-Struck
. A Town Garden
. Obsessional
. Julia and the Bazooka