Letty Fox: Her Luck

By Christina Stead
Introduction by Tim Parks

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods upon me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.

So begins Letty Fox's own story, a comic extravaganza in which she tells about the crazy circus of her early life; about her moping mother, absent father, and two impossible sisters; about work and play, sex and men, and the seemingly unending search for a lasting relationship. This vast Flemish canvas of a novel, full of strikingly realistic likenesses and unforgettable grotesques, is a major work by one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth century.

Reviews

. . .This most undervalued of our contemporaries.
— Angela Carter, London Review of Books

[Christina Stead] is really marvelous. She gropes here, she gropes there, she introduces this subject and that subject, seems to talk to no purpose—talk and talk! Then suddenly, with a wild outburst, she understands something. A discovery has been made.
— Saul Bellow

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.