The Green Child - Softcover

Herbert Read

3.71

586 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811201724 ISBN 13: 9780811201728

Publisher: New Directions, 1935

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"[B]eautifully written....a triumph of delicate and suggestive mystification."―The New York Times

First published in 1935, The Green Child is Herbert Read's only novel. But if he had written nothing else, this one inspired book would insure his fame. It is a Utopian novel, a unique blend of reality and fantasy which moves from the English countryside to the South American pampas and then to a mysterious and eternal underground of caves.

In genre The Green Child is perhaps closest to the French conte philosophique, yet the word "philosophical" suggests the abstruse, whereas this is a very moving and exciting story, alive with the poetry of living, and, at the same time, with a strange kind of other-worldly suspense. In his introduction Kenneth Rexroth speaks of the book's "unearthly, hypnotic radiance," and Graham Greene has said of it: "here Read conveys the private sense of glory, the same sense of glory that impelled Christian writers to picture the City of God." T. S. Eliot once told the publisher that he considered The Green Child to be one of the finest examples of English prose style of the century.

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About the Author:

Sir Herbert Edward Read, (1893–1968) was an English anarchist poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.

Poet-essayist Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was a high-school dropout, disillusioned ex-Communist, pacifist, anarchist, rock-climber, critic and translator, mentor, Catholic-Buddhist spiritualist and a prominent figure of San Francisco's Beat scene. He is regarded as a central figure of the San Francisco Renaissance and is among the first American poets to explore traditional Japanese forms such as the haiku.

Review:

“[B]eautifully imagined and beautifully written.”
- Robert Gorham Davis

“[A] very charming philosophical tale.”
- The Times [London]

“[R]emarkable for its cool yet vivid style.”
- Bob Barker, poet

“The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original.”
- Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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