The Orange in the Orange:

A Novella and Two Stories

The Orange in the Orange, a novella and two stories by Fielding Dawson draws on his experiences as a prison teacher. In the novella, ‘The Orange in the Orange,’ “Dawson peels away at himself, in the hero-teacher character, with zeal and more deeply than he has before. Sure, the setting, in prison, where he teaches writing, kind of forces the issue. A prison building is a spectacle for all of us outside, but inside everything is detail. Detail requires alertness, and in prison there are penalties for lack of alertness. The teacher of prisoners is a spectacle until he or she proves otherwise.”

This book goes way against the grain of the entertainment culture, of industrial-strength spectacle… in The Orange in the Orange, the mind is working overtime, but the reader who works along with writer gets paid time-and-a-half. Reading Dawson, one is never ashamed of having idled away one’s time on literary bon-bons.
—Robert Bové

Fielding Dawson attended the famed Black Mountain College from 1949 to 1952, before settling in New York City where he became part of the Beat scene. Dawson is admired for his stream-of-consciousness style fiction with minimal punctuation, lax grammar, and naturalistic dialogue. Dawson wrote twenty-two books of short stories and memoirs, as well as a history of the Black Mountain College movement.

“Dawson’s ear for speech is im­peccable, but more startling is the way speech… is connected to thought, and how thought itself is formed in a seamless way in the author’s prose… [his] prose is complex, driven and quick, and the reader constantly feels he is en­countering the ruminations of the mind in ways he has never experienced before.” —New York Times Book Review

“No writer moves more aptly, quickly, closely, in the tracking of human dimensions of feeling and relation.” —Robert Creeley

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