Things to Put Away

John Thompson was part of the vibrant postmodern New York literary scene of the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies. That scene was famously fueled by love, liquor, food and parties, but most of all by ideas, by words, serious and witty, spoken and written. Thompson’s only novel, never published in his lifetime, tells the poignant yet humorous tale of a young boy in the Middle West in the 1920s. Each of the six chapters is written in a different voice, creating a powerful literary mosaic of a boy’s experience of tragic loss. In the author’s words, the stories in this semi-autobiographical novel, “design no more but to give a few glimpses of how some things used to be a long time ago, fictitious things, when the curtain of forgetfulness was falling as it must over our childhood.”

Edited by Louise Thompson and Ruth Losack