A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE
Peter S. Beagle

Autographed by the author.
Tachyon Publications 2007 edition — This edition presents the definitive text of A Fine and Private Place, as revised and corrected by the author and Connor Cochran. The cover design by Ann Monn features special photographs of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which was Peter's original inspiration for the book.
Trade paperback. 1st printing.

$25.00     Click here to order A Fine And Private Place.

One of literature’s most beautiful works about ghostly times and places . . . told with wit, charm, and a sense of individuality

          — The New York Times Book Review

It's a fully-rounded region, this otherworld of Peter Beagle's imagination.

          — Kirkus Reviews

Tattered, beloved, third time to replace. When I loan this one out, I am obsessive about it's return. I have read this myself five times — and three times out loud to others. I wish I could find a new friend that needs to hear this book. The writing is poetry. One of my most beloved books ever.

          — Mary F. Scott, Amazon Review

Novelists seldom blossom early. Poets do it all the time, but the number of young writers who write really good fiction is quite modest. The number who with first novels achieve full mastery is tiny. Mailer managed it with The Naked and the Dead at 25, and Fitzgerald with This Side of Paradise at 24. Stephen Crane beat them both with The Red Badge of Courage at 23 — 22 if you want to count his privately published Maggie (I don't). The usual case is a Melville, or Bellow, or Faulkner, or Henry James reaching the top of his form only after a thorough apprenticeship. Peter Beagle is one of the glorious exceptions. His senior year in college he wrote a novel about love, longing, and death. The next year Viking published it. The year was 1960, and Beagle was 21 years old. Whoever at Viking wrote the jacket blurb composed the usual fatuities and then concluded, "It would not be at all surprising if this novel became a minor classic." The blurb-writer was correct. A Fine and Private Place is an astonishingly good book: a pure and perfect comedy with tragic overtones."

          — Noel Perrin, Bookworld

This is not a book about ghosts, or a talking raven. It is not a book about a quiet, kindhearted man who has run away from the world to go live in a cemetery, or a woman who doesn’t know what to do with her life, now that the husband she worshipped is fourteen months dead. It isn’t about any of those things.

Those are just the trappings.

What this book is really about is love and resurrection. It loudly proclaims that there is no such thing as a last chance, not if you are brave enough — and not if you understand that our greatest opportunities for bravery are our moments of greatest loss and fear.

These are the qualities that make this book timeless, and perfect for the world we are in today. It's great to see it back in print at last, especially in an edition that corrects all the errors that were introduced by the original publisher, and which have been bugging Peter for 47 years. As a special treat for readers, this edition comes with an extensive afterword, and the images in Ann Monn's new cover design were photographed by Ann in the Bronx's amazing Woodlawn Cemetery: the place which originally inspired Peter to write this novel when he was still only 19 years old.

          — Connor Cochran

Yes, I would like to get A Fine And Private Place.