Evan Connell has long been attracted to the visionary and eccentric, to those people and events slightly outside the mainstream of human experience. His subjects are people of passion and purpose, events of legend and desire. He offers stories of the Anazasi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the grand explorers Marco Polo, Columbus, Magellan, and Ibn Batuta, of heretics, fanatics, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. There are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archeology, astronomy, and linguistics. This is a book of great "celebrations of man's insatiable drive to probe unknown frontiers [that] read like superb novels," says Grover Sales of the San Francisco Chronicle. "[They] establish Connell as an important writer-poet-thinker with a truly original mind."
The Aztec Treasure House comprises two previous collections, The White Lantern and A Long Desire, and two new essays never published in trade book form. The whole amounts to a dazzling monument to the career of one of America's finest writers.
