Barbara Comyns was born in England in 1909 and raised in a
Warwickshire country house. She and her siblings were largely in
the care of governesses, and allowed to run wild. She began writing
and illustrating her work when she was a girl. In her teens she
attended art school in London. She then married a painter and had
two children. To support her family, she dealt in antiques and
vintage cars, renovated apartments, and bred poodles. She later
lived in Spain for eighteen years. In addition to writing, she was
an accomplished painter and exhibited with the London Group. She
died in 1992, leaving two children, several grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, and eleven books.
Brian Evenson is the author of more than a dozen books
of fiction. His novel Last Days won the American Library
Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His
novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a
finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild
Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean
Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine,
Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry
Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated
into French, Italian, Greek Japanese, Persian, Russia, Spanish,
Slovenian, and Turkish. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the
Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
“Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as
to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The Guardian
“Comyns has a pictorial eye, and though she wrote stories from a
young age, she originally thought of herself as a sculptor and
painter...[her] wild but exact style is always instantly
recognizable, a mix of looseness and compression.” —Jé Wilson, The
New York Review of Books
“Comyns’s own witchy way of looking at the world arises from her
resourceful craft—her wordsmithery—which like a spell or a charm
gives her fiction a unique flavor, and has won her a cult
following.” —Marina Warner
“Comyns is one of those writers you can barely believe ever goes
out of print. Her books are so funny, so exact, so twisted, you
imagine their appeal would last for generations. Luckily for us,
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, originally published in 1954, has
been rescued by the new publishing project Dorothy.” —Jessa
Crispin, PBS
“An aberrant pastoral as smart as this one could only come from
someone with a biography as nutty and wonderful as Comyns’s.”
—Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review Daily
“Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead keeps the reader guessing by
freely switching point-of-view characters, flowing in and out of
characters’ heads from paragraph to paragraph in a way that makes a
small town haunted by mysterious illness feel like one infected
organism. . . . Thanks to NYRB and the Dorothy Project, Comyns’
days of being underrated in America are over.” —Chicago Tribune
“The reason the censors might once have been afraid of this book is
the reason we should rejoice in its publication: In Comyns’s lack
of moralizing is freedom for the reader, and from that freedom
comes change, including an increase in moral complexity,
intellectual range, and truest empathy.” —PEN America
“The real trippiness of the novel—about an English village struck
by a mysterious epidemic—lies not just in its eye-rubbingly bright
details, but also in its moral sensibility. Flood, fire, madness
descend on Comyns’s characters without any of the usual narratorial
handwringing, occasionally accompanied by ducks. Comyns is so
matter-of-fact as to be surreal, and irresistible.” —Lorin Stein,
The Paris Review Daily
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