Evan S. Connell Books in Order

Seventeen-year-old Melvin Isaacs enters naval flight training in 1942 carrying his father’s patriotic beliefs. Training, war, and the uneasy return to civilian life force him to develop an independent understanding of duty, conformity, and humanity’s future.

India Bridge enjoys material comfort with her husband and three children in suburban Kansas City, yet struggles with vague dissatisfaction. Small domestic encounters expose the assumptions, restrictions, and emotional distance shaping her life around the Second World War.

Evan S. Connell assembles anecdotes, historical fragments, obscure knowledge, and unfamiliar quotations into a meditation on human existence. The work draws connections between seemingly scattered observations to question the world people inhabit and the condition of humanity.

Isolated in a San Francisco apartment during the 1960s, Earl Summerfield records grievances against his wife, employers, and a changing society. His resentments turn into fantasies of retribution, then nighttime intrusions and a dangerous fixation on one woman.

Successful Kansas City lawyer Walter Bridge relies on conventional values and an orderly household in the 1930s. His wife’s unhappiness and his children’s resistance challenge a worldview that leaves him poorly equipped to understand the people closest to him.

Connell's sequence of poems assembles a narrator's searching notes into a larger pattern of thought. Connections emerge across the fragments, inviting the reader to follow their shifting arguments, images, and questions about the limits of human understanding.

Insurance executive Muhlbach discovers a pre-Columbian figurine during a business trip to Taos and buys it on impulse. His growing fascination with collecting transforms a passing curiosity into an obsession that reshapes his perception and conduct.

Conservative widower Karl Muhlbach becomes involved with the much younger Lambeth Brent, whose unpredictable behavior unsettles his orderly life. Their attraction draws him into unfamiliar territory, exposing the differences in experience and outlook that stand between them.

Through the imagined journals of seven alchemists, including Paracelsus, Evan Connell explores a world poised between medieval belief and modern science. Their distinct voices probe nature, faith and human ambition through the mysteries of their craft.

Fifty-six stories gather decades of Evan S. Connell’s short fiction, combining earlier collections with previously uncollected work. Across comic and painful encounters, ordinary people reveal the contradictions, frailties, and unexpected connections that shape American lives.

Beginning with the call to crusade in France in 1095, this chronicle follows successive Christian campaigns against Muslim powers in the Holy Land. Across two centuries, religious conviction and warfare reshape the lives of those drawn into the conflict.

Evan S. Connell explores the ambitions of explorers, scientists, visionaries, and eccentrics through historical essays. Accounts of the Anasazi, Marco Polo, and advances in several sciences examine humanity’s persistent urge to discover what lies beyond familiar boundaries.

Evan S. Connell reconstructs Francisco Goya’s life against the violence and repression of his era in Spain. Following the painter’s encounters with royalty, ordinary people, and disturbing visions, he examines the experiences behind Goya’s enduring influence on art.

Evan S. Connell’s new and selected stories follow travelers, families, and solitary observers whose lives turn on seemingly minor experiences. Quiet encounters and unresolved memories accumulate meaning, revealing emotional tensions beneath outwardly unremarkable moments.