In Youth Is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915€“1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch€s work, what is most important are the details of his characters€ surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, €œmakes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes.€ Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his €œFive Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You,€ and writes: €œMaybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch€s In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.€ Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of €œI Left My Grandfather€s House.€ This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth Is Pleasure.