The Pilgrim Hawk ─ A Love Story

This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink ?ows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and farcical, begins.

A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner’s The Bear as one of the ?nest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

Glenway Wescott (1901–1987) grew up in Wisconsin, but moved to France with his companion Monroe Wheeler in 1925. Wescott’s early fiction, notably the stories in Goodbye, Wisconsin and the novel The Grandmothers (in which Alwyn Tower, the narrator of The Pilgrim Hawk, makes his first appearance), were set in his native Midwest. Later work included essays on political, literary, and spiritual subjects, as well as the novels The Pilgrim Hawk and Apartment in Athens (also available as an NYRB Classic). Wescott’s journals, recording his many literary and artistic friendships and offering an intimate view of his life as a gay man, were published posthumously under the title Continual Lessons.

Michael Cunningham is the author of five novels, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall.