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“Real horrorshow”: the iconic covers of A Clockwork Orange through the decades

Restored Edition

A Clockwork Orange

Fully restored edition of Anthony Burgess' original text of A Clockwork Orange, with a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews 
 
Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
'It is a horrorshow story ...' 
 
Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? 
 
A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel's 'sweet and juicy criminality'. 
 
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He spent six years in the British Army before becoming a schoolmaster and colonial education officer in Malaya and Brunei. After the success of his Malayan Trilogy, he became a full-time writer in 1959. His books have been published all over the world, and they include The Complete Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, Napoleon Symphony, Tremor of Intent, Earthly Powers and A Dead Man in Deptford. Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993. 
 
Andrew Biswell is the Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. His publications include a biography, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, which won the Portico Prize in 2006. He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.

Still delivers the shock of the new ... a red streak of gleeful evil

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He spent six years in the British Army before becoming a schoolmaster and colonial education officer in Malaya and Brunei. After the success of his Malayan Trilogy, he became a full-time writer in 1959. His books have been published all over the world, and they include The Complete Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, Napoleon Symphony, Tremor of Intent, Earthly Powers and A Dead Man in Deptford. Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993. 
 
Andrew Biswell is the Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. His publications include a biography, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, which won the Portico Prize in 2006. He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.

Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? 
 
A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel's 'sweet and juicy criminality'.

A new critical edition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange - one of the most influential books of the twentieth century

A brilliant novel . . . a tour-de-force in nastiness, an inventive primer in total violence, a savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.

I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language as Mr Burgess has done here - the fact that this is also a very funny book may pass unnoticed.

Burgess’s dystopian fantasy still fascinates as it clocks up 50 years

The 50th anniversary of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is celebrated this weekend with the publication of a handsome new hardback edition (the edges of its paper are orange!) by Random House (£20). It is compiled and edited by Andrew Biswell – Burgess's biographer – and has a foreword by Martin Amis, as well as unpublished material including a 1972 interview with Burgess, the prologue to his 1986 A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music, and his annotated 1961 typescript of the novel, complete with his doodles in the margins. His picture of an orange with a spring poking out of it is particularly special

We might therefore suppose that Burgess would appreciate the publication of a “restored edition” of A Clockwork Orange (Heinemann, £20; US, W. W. Norton, $24.95) to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his best-known work. Expertly edited by Andrew Biswell, and including a foreword by Martin Amis and a wealth of supplementary materials – explanatory notes, an expanded glossary of Nasdat, contemporary reviews by Kingsley Amis and Malcolm Bradbury among others, essays by Burgess and the “Prologue” and “Epilogue” to his musical stage version (1987) – the volume grants Burgess the kind of salutatory treatment he bestowed on others.

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He served in the British army from 1940 to 1946 and was a schoolteacher in England before becoming a colonial education officer in 1954. His Malayan trilogy of novels and a history of English literature were published while he was living in Malaya and Brunei. 
 
He became a full-time writer in 1959 and achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the most versatile novelists of his day. His writings include biographies of Shakespeare and Hemingway, critical studies of James Joyce, stage plays, and two volumes of autobiography. His work as a composer and librettist includes the Broadway musical, Cyrano, and Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based on Joyce's Ulysses. 
 
His 33 novels continue to be published all over the world. They include A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun, The Complete Enderby, Earthly Powers, Napoleon Symphony, and Beard's Roman Women, a collaboration with the photographer David Robinson. 
 
Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993.

The fully restored fiftieth anniversary edition 
 
Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
First published by William Heinemann in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. This special edition, compiled and edited by Andrew Biswell, Burgess's biographer, restores the text of the novel as Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a selection of interviews, articles, reviews and other previously unpublished material.

Little Wilson and Big God

A high spirited candid book of confessions from the twentieth century literary giant Anthony Burgess

Like the best of Burgess' novels, the book has terrific pace and vivacity... It is the story of a sort of Unlucky Jim

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

Byrne

Completed shortly before Burgess's death, this novel in verse is extravagantly original

A rumbustious memorial to one of the most unignorable literary presences of our time

Dazzling... A brilliant and surprising conclusion to the career of one of the most intelligent and tireless writers of the century

Byrne is full of his characteristic wit, gusto and erudition

A complex dark comedy in fluently rhymed verse. Frequently hilarious and always engaging, this final book simultaneously satisfies the differing demands of prose fiction and narrative verse. Composed mostly in the same ottava rima that Byron used for "Don Juan," Byrne shows Burgess in command of his poetic medium. One might expect an author to experience new spiritual insight on his deathbed, but such a technical breakthrough is highly unusual

Michael Byrne is an Irish Don Juan - a composer, a charmer, a bigamist and a thug.  He moves from country to country, from bed to bed, selling his talents and leaving a trail of children in his wake.  His journey takes him from post-Great War London to the centre of Hitler's Third Reich and then he vanishes. His twin sons travel across the troubled face of Europe to pursue their father for one final apocalyptic reckoning.

The Complete Enderby

Written between 1960 and 1984, and now collected in one volume, the four 'Enderby' novels are Burgess's finest comic achievement.

The Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by Evelyn Waugh

Ferociously funny and wildly verbally inventive

Burgess is at his most inventive in these books, especially when he gives us the full text of Enderby's songs and sonnets (many of which are laughably bad). Poetry, Burgess seems to conclude, is rather like shitting: it's really about purging oneself of dead matter

Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom

No less an authority than Harold Bloom rates the Enderby books among the great comic fictions of our time. Certainly Anthony Burgess, that dizzying polymath and flamboyant novelist, never created a more engaging hero than this hapless poet... All in all, these four books, though diverse in tone and character, strikingly exhibit the narrative gusto and linguistic sprezzatura of Anthony Burgess at his best

Enderby is a poet, social critic and Catholic. He may be found hiding in the lavatory where much of his best work is composed, or perhaps in Rome, brainwashed into respectability by a glamorous wife, aftershave and the dolce vita. Whether he is pursuing revenge and inspiration in Morocco, expounding on his notorious sex film on a TV chat show, or writing a hit musical based on the life and work of Shakespeare, Enderby emerges triumphant.

The daring dystopian satire that inspired one of the most notorious films ever made, beautifully reimagined as part of the Penguin Essentials series 
 
'Every generation should discover this book' Time Out 
 ________________ 
 
In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but at what cost? 
 
 Experiment of language? Social prophecy? Black comedy? A Clockwork Orange is all of these. 
 
Dazzling and transgressive, this frightening fable about good and evil asks the meaning of human freedom. 
________________ 
 
'A gruesomely witty cautionary tale' Time 
 
 'Not only about man's violent nature and his capacity to choose between good and evil. It is about the excitements and intoxicating effects of language' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language . . . a very funny book' William S. Burroughs 
 
 'One of the cleverest and most original writers of his generation' The Times

Every generation should discover this book

Not only about man's violent nature and his capacity to choose between good and evil. It is about the excitements and intoxicating effects of language

I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language...a very funny book

One of the cleverest and most original writers of his generation

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He studied English at Manchester University and joined the army in 1940 where he spent six years in the Education Corps. After demobilization, he worked first as a college lecturer in Speech and Drama and then as a grammar-school master before becoming an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malay and Borneo. In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and decided to become a full-time writer. Despite being given less than a year to live, Burgess went on to write at least a book a year - including A Clockwork Orange (1962), M/F (1971), Man of Nazareth (1979), Earthly Powers (1980) and The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985) - and hundreds of book reviews right up until his death. He was also a prolific composer and produced many full-scale works for orchestra and other media during his lifetime. Anthony Burgess died in 1993.

'What we were after was lashings of ultraviolence' 
 
In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but at what cost? 
 
Social prophecy? Black comedy? Study of freewill? A Clockwork Orange is all of these. It is also a dazzling experiment in language, as Burgess creates a new language - 'nadsat', the teenage slang of a not-too-distant future.

Earthly Powers

Rollicking, panoramic epic of 20th century by the author of 'A Clockwork Orange'

Crowded, crammed, bursting with manic erudition, garlicky puns, omnilingual jokes... which meshes the real and personalised history of the twentieth century

Enormous imagination and vitality - a huge book in every way

A hellfire tract thrown down by a novelist at the peak of his powers

Burgess's ambitious study of 20th-century history centers on the stormy relationship between an effete, popular novelist and a Faustian priest

Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by a common understanding of mankind's frailties. In this epic masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power and the lengths men will go for it.

A Dead Man in Deptford

Murder mystery based on the infamous life and death of Christopher Marlowe.

Legendary intoxication with language and wordplay is very much in evidence as he (Burgess) evokes the raw, freewheeling spirit of the Elizabethan age

The story is intensely true to the surfaces and smells of Elizabethan London, and also Burgess's own final meditation on his great themes, the sexual and artistic impulses, and their end in death. A masterpiece.

If you want a Marlowe that breathes and an England that attacks the senses then you will find both in Anthony Burgess's astonishing final novel, A Dead Man in Deptford.

Burgess's novel moves with relish through fights, blasphemy and buggery to high talk of mathematics and necromancy in Raleigh's alternative think-tank, all written in well-judged pastiche.

'One of the most productive, imaginative and risk-taking of writers... It is a clever, sexually explicit, fast-moving, full blooded yarn' 
Irish Times 
 
A Dead Man in Deptford re-imagines the riotous life and suspicious death of Christopher Marlowe. Poet, lover and spy, Marlowe must negotiate the pressures placed upon him by theatre, Queen and country. Burgess brings this dazzling figure to life and pungently evokes Elizabethan England.

The Malayan Trilogy

A satiric trilogy about the last days of English Colonialism in Malaya in 1950s.

A sad, hilarious book about the underlife of the expatriate East

Magnificent black comedies about human nature: about vainglory, obliviousness, delusion, and the undertow of despair

'Like all good comic writers Mr Burgess lives his creations as much as he writes them. First class' 
Observer 
 
Anthony Burgess was an officer in the Colonial Service. In The Malayan Trilogy - Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East - he satirises the dog days of colonialism. Victor Crabbe is a well meaning, ineffectual English man in the tropics, keen to teach the Malays what the West can do for them. Through Crabbe's rise and fall and a series of wonderfully colourful characters, Burgess lays bare racial and social prejudices of post-war Malaya during the upheaval of Independence.

This classic of post-industrial alienation shocks us into a thoughtful exploration of the meaning of free will and the conflict between good and evil.

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
 
In this 1962 classic, a novelistic exploration of modern crime and punishment, Alex is the 15-year-old leader of his gang of "droogs" thriving in the ultraviolent future as prophetically imagined by Burgess. Speaking a bizarre Russian-derived slang, Alex and his friends freely pillage and slash their way across a nightmarish urban landscape until Alex is captured by the judicial arm of the state. He then becomes their prized guinea pig in a scientific program to completely "redeem" him for society. If we had the power of absolute criminal reform, what, the novel asks, would this mean for our ideals of freedom and society? 
 
This edition reinstates the final chapter missing from Kubrick's film, in which Alex is on the verge of starting a family as he reflects on--and completely rejects--his adolescent nastiness. It also includes Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked." 
 
 
© Anthony Burgess 1962 (P) Penguin Audio 2010

With a smooth, almost lyrical, crisp voice, Hollander delivers Burgess's nadsat dialect to readers with such rhythmic cadence that listeners will easily understand the extensive slang used throughout the book

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he decided to try to live by writing. 
 
He achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versitile. His writings include criticism, scripts and translations, and a Broadway musical, and he composed three symphonies which have been publicly performed in the USA. His books have been published all over the world and include A Clockwork Orange, The Clockwork Testament, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby's Dark Lady, Earthly Powers, Abba Abba and The End of the World News. 
 
Anthony Burgess died in 1993.

In this 1962 classic, a novelistic exploration of modern crime and punishment, Alex is the 15-year-old leader of his gang of "droogs" thriving in the ultraviolent future as prophetically imagined by Burgess. Speaking a bizarre Russian-derived slang, Alex and his friends freely pillage and slash their way across a nightmarish urban landscape until Alex is captured by the judicial arm of the state. He then becomes their prized guinea pig in a scientific program to completely "redeem" him for society. If we had the power of absolute criminal reform, what, the novel asks, would this mean for our ideals of freedom and society? 
 
This edition reinstates the final chapter missing from Kubrick's film, in which Alex is on the verge of starting a family as he reflects on--and completely rejects--his adolescent nastiness. It also includes Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. His other works include A Clockwork Orange (also available as a Penguin Modern Classic), Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside, Tremor of Intent, Nothing Like the Sun and Man of Nazareth. He died in 1993.

Kicked out of college and harassed by his lawyer, Miles Faber abandons New York and embarks on a defiant pilgrimage across the Caribbean to find the shrine of Sib Legeru, an obscure poet and painter. But in the streets of Castita's capital, where a wild religious festival is in full swing, a series of bizarre encounters - including his own repulsive doppelgänger (the son of a circus bird-woman) - and disturbing family revelations await Miles, who soon finds himself a willing victim of dynastic destiny. 
 
A darkly surreal comedy of dazzling linguistic inventiveness, MF is an outrageous tale of blood, lust and the machinations of fate.

You've Had Your Time

Following Little Wilson and Big God, this is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography, spanning the years from 1959 - 1982, from the start of his professional writing career to the centenary of James Joyce's birth and its effect on Burgess.

Extraordinarily lively, amazingly zestful, gutsy, bawdy fun

This autobiography, packed with extraordinary moments... provides a unique picture of today's literary world. It also has the effect of pinning Burgess down, making him, improbable as he is, real and believable. We will, I think read him better for this, and appreciate him more

What Burgess ''shows off'' in these pages is the vivid interest that a writer's life can hold when it is lived by a writer with a robust temperament, a showman's appetite for vulgarity and the kind of gargantuan, omnivorous learning that helps give polymathy a good name... You've Had Your Time is an exhilarating book which, like the best of Burgess's novels, fulfills the ancient obligations of delighting, instructing and moving with incomparable panache

In two huge volumes of "confessions"  Burgess wove a vast tapestry of his life. William Boyd, an admirer, said they were among the best novels that Burgess ever wrote

After returning from a trip to Brunei, Anthony Burgess, initially believing he has only a year to live, begins to write - novels, film scripts, television series, articles. It is the life of a man desperate to earn a living through the written word. He finds at first that writing brings little success, and later that success, and the obligations it brings, interfere with his writing - especially of fiction. There were vast Hollywood projects destined never to be made, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous. 
 
There is the éclat of A Clockwork Orange (and the consequent calls for Burgess to comment on violent atrocities), the huge success - after a long barren period - of Earthly Powers. There is a terrifying first marriage, his description of which is both painful and funny. His second marriage - and the discovery that he has a four-year-old son - changes his life dramatically, and he and Liana escape to the Mediterranean, for an increasingly European life. With this marriage comes the triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and travel - to America, to Australia and all over Europe.

'I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language ... a very funny book' William S. Burroughs 
 
Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence - he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's ninth. He and his gang of droogs rampage through a dystopian future, hunting for terrible thrills. But when Alex finds himself at the mercy of the state and subject to the ministrations of Dr Brodsky, and the mind-altering treatment of the Ludovico Technique, he discovers that fun is no longer the order of the day. The basis for Stanley Kubrick's notorious 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange is both a virtuoso performance from an electrifying prose stylist and a serious exploration of the morality of free will. 
 
In his introduction, Blake Morrison situates A Clockwork Orange within the context of Anthony Burgess's many other works, explores the author's unhappiness with the Stanley Kubrick film version, analyses the composition of the Nadsat argot spoken by Alex and his droogs, and examines the influences on Burgess's unique, eternally original style. 
 
With an Introduction by Blake Morrison

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. From 1954 to 1960 he was stationed in Malaysia as an education officer - during this time he started writing The Malayan Trilogy. Diagnosed with an unoperable brain tumour in 1959, Burgess became a full-time writer and went on to write a book a year up until his death in 1993. His many works include: The Complete Enderby, Tremor of Intent, The Kingdom of the Wicked and A Clockwork Orange.

In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?

Shakespeare

A delightful and uniquely imaginative tribute to the Bard, incorporating biography, theatrical history, and a vivid recreation of the Elizabethan age.

Bright, racy...knowledgeable and humorous, alternately sensible and quirky.

Anthony Burgess's wonderfully well-stocked mind and essentially wayward spirit are just right for summoning up an apparition of the Bard which is more convincing than most

Animated by affection and an understanding of the creative imagination that only a creative writer can bring to bear

A smooth-flowing narrative, often enlivened by Anthony Burgess's Joycean appetite for linguistic fantasy

Among Shakespeare's many biographers none brings to his subject more passion and feeling for the creative act than Anthony Burgess. He breathes life into Shakespeare the man and invigorates his times. His portrait of the age builds upon an almost personal tenderness for Shakespeare and his contemporaries (especially Ben Jonson), and on a profound sense of literary and theatrical history. Anthony Burgess's well-known delight in language infuses his own writing about Shakespeare's works. And in the verve of his biography he conveys the energy of the Elizabethan age.

Anthony Burgess

Wildly and fantastically funny . . . A remarkable and brilliantly imagined novel, vital and inventive

Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger.

Anthony Burgess

Books by Anthony Burgess

Articles featuring Anthony Burgess

“Real horrorshow”: the iconic covers of A Clockwork Orange through the decades

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