Rare Truman Capote Story from Early 1950s Is Being Published for First Time 

Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
TT
20

Rare Truman Capote Story from Early 1950s Is Being Published for First Time 

Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)

Along with such classics as “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” Truman Capote had a history of work left uncompleted and unpublished.

Capote, who died in 1984 shortly before his 60th birthday, spent much of his latter years struggling to write his planned Proustian masterpiece “Answered Prayers,” of which only excerpts were released. As a young man, he wrote a novel about a love affair between a socialite and a parking lot attendant that was published posthumously under the title “Summer Crossing.”

Shorter work, too, was sometimes abandoned, including a piece released this week for the first time.

Capote was in his mid-20s and a rising star when he moved from New York City to Taormina, Sicily, in 1950 and settled in a scenic villa named Fontana Vecchia, once occupied by D.H. Lawrence. Acclaimed for his debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and for his eerie short story “Miriam,” Capote would describe the move to Europe as a needed escape from the American literary scene, which he likened to living inside a light bulb, and an ideal setting to get work done: He wrote the novel “The Grass Harp” in Sicily and worked on numerous short stories.

“I am so happy to be writing stories again — they are my great love,” he wrote to a friend.

One story from Sicily, “Another Day in Paradise,” is an unfinished work that appears in the new issue of The Strand Magazine. Written at a time of relative contentment for Capote, “Another Day” is a narrative of disillusion and entrapment: The middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree has used her inheritance — a small one because her mother didn't trust her with money — to buy a villa in Sicily. She will end up betrayed by the local man who persuaded to invest her money, Signor Carlo Petruzzi, and too broke to sell the home and return to the US.

“The past had trained her to envision an affair from a futureless angle; at the most, she hoped such episodes would end in friendship. It was so humiliating that Carlo should have turned out not to be a friend. She’d trusted him to the extent of her capital: let him sell her the land, allowed him to build the villa, supply, at pirate prices, the native paraphernalia that furnished it,” Capote wrote.

“He was an emotional crook and, beyond that, a common gangster who’d pocketed at least half the money supposedly spent on Belle Vista. All this she could forgive him — could, but didn’t. The unforgivable aspect of the ghastly man’s behavior was that it had destroyed the meaning of these lines in her journal: `I belong. At last, somewhere.'”

Much of Capote's fiction was set in New York or in the American South, but “Another Day in Paradise” has the easy pace, decorative language and cutting — sometimes cruel — humor of his best known work, and the themes of loneliness, fear and regret. Thomas Fahy, author of “Understanding Truman Capote,” says that the author likely related to Iris Greentree's sense of displacement and alienation.

“He was constantly moving around as a child, from New Orleans to Alabama to New York to Connecticut,” Fahy says. “You could see how his life became very lonely and isolated.”

The Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and many others. Managing editor Andrew Gulli found the Capote story in the Library of Congress, inside an “old red- and gold-scrolled Florentine notebook,” he writes on the Strand editorial page. The handwritten manuscript, worked in pencil, was at times so hard to make out that Gulli needed a transcriber to help prepare it for publication.

Fahy says that Capote’s time in Sicily, where he remained for just over a year, left him with the kind of feelings many authors have when away from their native countries — a heightened sense of distance from home that likely helped inspire “Another in Paradise,” and a heightened clarity. which he drew upon for “The Grass Harp” and its memories of his years in Monroeville, Alabama.



Egypt Unveils First Ancient Royal Tomb since Tutankhamun

These handout pictures released by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities on February 19, 2025 show the entrance to the tomb of King Thutmose II in Luxor in southern Egypt. (Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities / AFP)
These handout pictures released by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities on February 19, 2025 show the entrance to the tomb of King Thutmose II in Luxor in southern Egypt. (Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities / AFP)
TT
20

Egypt Unveils First Ancient Royal Tomb since Tutankhamun

These handout pictures released by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities on February 19, 2025 show the entrance to the tomb of King Thutmose II in Luxor in southern Egypt. (Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities / AFP)
These handout pictures released by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities on February 19, 2025 show the entrance to the tomb of King Thutmose II in Luxor in southern Egypt. (Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities / AFP)

Egypt's antiquities authority says it has found the ancient tomb of King Thutmose II, the first royal burial to be located since the famed discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.

The tomb, discovered near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt, belonged to King Thutmose II of the 18th dynasty, who lived nearly 3,500 years ago.

Thutmose II was an ancestor to Tutankhamun himself, and his half-sister and queen consort was Pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Her giant mortuary temple stands on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor a few kilometers (miles) from where the tomb of Thutmose II was found.

Although preliminary studies suggest its contents were moved in ancient times -- leaving the tomb without the iconic mummy or gilded splendor of the Tutankhamun find -- the antiquities ministry on Tuesday called the discovery "one of the most significant archaeological breakthroughs in recent years".

It has been excavated by a joint Egyptian-British mission, led by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the New Kingdom Research Foundation.

The tomb's entrance was first located in 2022 in the Luxor mountains west of the Valley of the Kings, but was believed at the time to lead to the tomb of a royal wife.

But the team then found "fragments of alabaster jars inscribed with the name of Pharaoh Thutmose II, identified as the 'deceased king', alongside inscriptions bearing the name of his chief royal consort, Queen Hatshepsut", confirming whose tomb it was, the ministry said.

Shortly after the king's burial, water flooded the burial chamber, damaging the interior and leaving fragments of plaster that bore parts of the Book of Amduat, an ancient mortuary text on the underworld.

Some funerary furniture belonging to Thutmose II has also been recovered from the tomb in "the first-ever find" of its kind, according to the ministry.

It quoted mission chief Dr Piers Litherland as saying the team will continue its work in the area, hoping to find the tomb's original contents.

There has been a surge of major archaeological discoveries in recent years, as Egypt seeks to boost its tourism industry as a key source of foreign currency revenue.

Last year, Egypt hosted 15.7 million tourists and aims to attract 18 million visitors in 2025.

The crown jewel of the government's strategy is the long-delayed inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum at the foot of the pyramids in Giza, which Egypt has said will finally open this year.