Music for Chameleons Paperback - 1994

From the rear cover

'Everything is displayed in this book: insights and recollections of the famous and the obscure; old jokes and fresh wit... These stories and vignettes will endure.' - New Republic.In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders them with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction.

From the jacket flap

In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders then with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old girl he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, remainds one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of our time.

Media reviews

 “Electrifying . . . a knockout. Capote’s alacrity and cunning makes this his most enjoyable book.” —Newsweek

 “An incomparable stylist and entertainer . . . clean and cool . . . [with a] superb, near-perfect pitch with dialogue.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Everything is displayed in this book: insights and recollections of the famous and the obscure; old jokes and fresh wit. . . . These stories and vignettes will endure.” —The New Republic