STONE, Robert.

£250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Bay of Souls. First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author in the month of publication on the title page, "For Dink, with admiration and thanks and best wishes always, Robert Stone, Key West, April 2003". The rear panel of the dust jacket has the price sticker of Key West Island Books, Florida, where this copy was presumably first sold and signed.The recipient was Benjamin "Dink" Bruce, a cult figure in Key West, Florida. Dink's father Telly Otto Bruce ("Toby") originally moved to Key West at the behest of his Arkansas friend Ernest Hemingway in 1935, serving the author in a vague capacity of general fixer for some thirty years, and Dink later became a local cult figure in his own right: "Bruce seemed to cross paths with every celebrity who came through Key West. He didn't seek them out; they found him. In Key West, Dink Bruce was royalty" (McKeen, p. 90). Robert Stone lived in Key West until his death in 2015."Unusual (for Stone) in its brevity, this is a highly concentrated work, probably the least violent yet most unnerving of his novels. And the philosophical conflict dramatized in it ends surprisingly, in a way that provokes new questions about what Stone is up to in his writing" (Rush).

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