'Breathtaking ... The stories are special. They stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled' Andrew Johnson, Independent Written when Truman Capote was in his teens and twenties, these recently-discovered short stories give a rare insight into an American icon. Tales of disappointed lovers, ageing spinsters, hoboes and murderous housewives, of yearning, poverty, despair, compassion, wit and wonder, they show us the boy from Alabama who became one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary voices. 'An intriguing glimpse of Capote as a boy: precocious, provocative, spirited and strange, a "pocket Merlin" spinning tall tales' Olivia Laing, New Statesman