The Trout Stream/A Stick of Green Candy/Narcissus Bay/Camp Cataract (Four Corners Familiars)

For this fifth volume in the Four Corners Familiars series, in which artists respond to literary classics, the young San Francisco artist Colter Jacobsen (born 1975) has chosen four absolute masterpieces of short fiction: Jane Bowles' “A Stick of Green Candy” and “Camp Cataract,” and Denton Welch's “The Trout Stream” and “Narcissus Bay.” Bowles (1917–1973) and Welch (1915–1948) share a perceptiveness and surgical lucidity for moods and surfaces that William Burroughs, a fan of both authors, remarked upon: “both writers are masters of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written… each has a very special way of seeing things.” Jacobsen, who has previously collaborated with the writers Bill Berkson and Kevin Killian, and whose paired drawings―one drawn from life, the other from memory―demonstrate a flair and desire for response and collaboration, adds to these stories his marginalia, chapter headings and paired drawings, making of the whole an enticing mesh of sympathies.