Browse by Artist: WELCH, DENTON

Artist:	WELCH, DENTON
Title:	In Youth Is Pleasure
Label:	EXACT CHANGE
Format:	Book
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	EC WELCH

New 2008 edition (originally reissued by Exact Change in 1994), with added cover blurb from Richard Hell! "First published in 1945, In Youth is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school -- but as in all of Welch's work what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William Burroughs writes, 'makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes.' Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of I Left my Grandfather's House. This first-person account of a idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was eighteen makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth is Pleasure." "Delicacy of perception is precisely the same thing as delicacy of description. Denton Welch is like a British baby Proust in his astounding grasp of his own (usually 'mundane') experience. Nothing much happens in his books but the most wonderful writing." -- Richard Hell

Artist:	WELCH, DENTON
Title:	Maiden Voyage
Label:	EXACT CHANGE
Format:	Book
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	EC WELCH3

"Maiden Voyage is an account of author Denton Welch's sixteenth year, when he ran away from his English public school and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book was Welch's first and created a sensation on publication in 1943; its frank description of public schoolboy life forced publisher Herbert Read to initially seek advice from libel lawyers. Even Winston Churchill's private secretary gossiped in a letter that, 'the book was reeking with homosexuality... I think I must get it.' Today, Welch's expressions of sexuality may seem more demure than outrageous, but his portrayal of the passions and humiliations of adolescence is graphic. As in all of Welch's novels, it is the precisely realized details of the author's physical and social surroundings that make the book such a remarkable journey."

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