Hard Candy

Tennessee Williams at his most uncompromising - eight stories of desire, degradation, and desperate tenderness. This 1967 New Directions paperback collects Williams's fiction from the 1950s and early '60s, a period when his plays dominated Broadway but his prose explored territories too raw for commercial theatre. The title story's sadomasochistic encounter sets the collection's tone: Williams refuses to sentimentalize or moralize, instead tracing how people use and destroy each other in pursuit of fleeting connection.

Stories like "Three Players of a Summer Game" and "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" explore masculinity, homosexual desire, and the violence lurking beneath Southern politeness. New Directions, Williams's longtime publisher, provided haven for work mainstream magazines wouldn't touch.

The stark 1967 cover signals the collection's unvarnished content - no magnolias or streetcars, just psychological excavation. Williams's prose in this period achieves a stripped-down intensity, influenced by the confessional poetry movement and the sexual frankness emerging in 1960s literature. For readers who think they know Williams through his plays, "Hard Candy" reveals the unmediated psyche behind those theatrical masterworks - hunger, cruelty, beauty, and the terrible cost of human contact.