By Caroline Gordon 

“Home is where the heart is, but the heart, nowadays, is on the run.”

Tom and Vera Claiborne have settled at Blencker’s Brook with a motley assortment of friends, family, and literati. Despite life being “a party every day,” a deepening sense of disaffection develops among its inhabitants: Tom, frustrated by his poetic impotency, takes a mistress; his cousin and his wife offer psychiatric theories and treatments; and Vera throws herself into farming and animal husbandry—all of them seeking to find what once was lost.

Gordon’s second-to-last novel, originally published in 1956, The Malefactors, so perfectly captures the enervated carnality and marmoreal frigidity of the Lost Generation, and the ensuing need and desire for meaning, that Flannery O’Connor called it “undoubtedly the most serious and successful fictional treatment of a conversion by an American writer to date.”

Caroline Gordon (1895–1981) was an American novelist and critic. Her writing earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship and O. Henry Award and a prominent place in the Southern Renaissance. A convert to the Catholic faith, she was friend and mentor to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and others. Robert Penn Warren praised her for “enriching our literature uniquely.” Her works include The Strange Children, How to Read a Novel, and (with Allen Tate) The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story.

Paperback: 292pp.

ISBN: 978-1950970179