About Gabriel García Márquez: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a short-story writer, novelist, journalist and a screenwriter from Colombia. He was a reporter for a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, and also a foreign correspondent stationed in New York, Rome, Paris and Barcelona. Marquez is the author of numerous popular novels and short stories. He is well known for his unique literary style known as magical realism, in which he describes reality through magical events and elements. His most popular novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Gabriel García Márquez

Kami Garcia

Eric Garcia

Helena Garcia

About Justin Garcia: Dr. Justin R. Garcia is an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher. He is Executive Director &amp; Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. He is also the Scientific Advisor to Match Group and Match.com, where he provides expertise to the company’s annual Singles in America study. His research has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair.

Justin Garcia

About Héctor García / Hector García: Héctor García is a citizen of Japan, where he has lived for over a decade, and of Spain, where he was born. He is the author of several books about Japanese culture, including two worldwide bestsellers, A Geek in Japan and Ikigai. A former software engineer, he worked at CERN in Switzerland before moving to Japan.

Héctor García

About Eduardo Garcia: Eduardo Garcia has written dozens of stories for the New York Times on how people can reduce their carbon footprint. He has written news stories and features from more than a dozen countries in his more than fifteen years as a journalist. A native of Spain, Eduardo cut his teeth working as a Reuters correspondent in Guatemala, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador. Eduardo strives to lead a sustainable lifestyle and believes in using words to empower people.

Eduardo Garcia

Roberto Garcia

Lisa Gabriele

Sarah Gabriel

About Gabriel Weston: Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She studied English at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London and becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her Sunday Times bestselling debut, Direct Red, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the PEN-Ackerley Award for Autobiography, while her novel Dirty Work won the McKitterick Prize. The presenter of several BBC TV series, including Trust Me I’m a Doctor and Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook, she currently works as a part-time surgeon and lives in London with her husband and children.

Gabriel Weston

About Gabrielle Kent: Gabrielle Kent worked as a graphic artist on video games before becoming a senior lecturer in games development. Now a full-time author, her work includes Alfie Bloom - a series about a boy who inherits a castle and a whole load of magical problems, Knights and Bikes - a series based on the video game of the same name, and Rani Reports, featuring a girl who wants to be an investigative journalist and her adventures with her rambunctious Mauritian nani. Gabrielle lives in the North East of England with her husband, daughter and agoraphobic cat.

Gabrielle Kent

About Philip Gabriel: Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Philip Gabriel

About Gabriel Tallent: Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast. His first novel, My Absolute Darling was a Sunday Times bestseller, a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and children.

Gabriel Tallent

About Gabriel Pogrund: Gabriel Pogrund is Whitehall Editor at the Sunday Times. He was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards (2023). He won Scoop of the Year at the London Press Club Awards (2022) and was the Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post in 2018.

Gabriel Pogrund

Gabrielle Pinto

About Gabrielle Grillo: Gabrielle Grillo lives in Bordeaux, France and she likes to knit conventional stuff like scarves and cardigans. She discovered the world of strange knits in 2010 and chose to start a Tumblr about it.

Gabrielle Grillo

About Gabriel Weinberg: Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of the multi-billion dollar internet privacy company, DuckDuckGo. He contributes to a number of publications including Medium and is the co-author of Traction.

Gabriel Weinberg

Gabrielle Mander

Ester García-Cortés / Ester García-Cortes.

Ester García-Cortés

Elizabeth Gabriel

Gabrielle Rifkind

About Gabriel Gatehouse: GABRIEL GATEHOUSE is a journalist and broadcaster. The former International Editor of Newsnight and co-host of Ukrainecast on BBC Sounds, he has reported from almost every recent conflict around the world, from Ukraine to Syria, Libya to Iraq. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, most recently the 2023 Broadcasting Press Guild (for The Coming Storm podcast) and the 2020 Foreign Press Association award for his coverage of the Hong Kong protests. He has reported extensively from the United States on the rise and fall of Donald Trump. His podcast, The Coming Storm, which launched in January 2022 to critical acclaim, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Gabriel Gatehouse

Gabrielle Marcola

About Gabriele Marcotti: Born in Italy and now living in London, Gabriele Marcotti is a senior writer and analyst for ESPN, World Football Correspondent for The Times and UK correspondent for Corriere dello Sport. His previous books include The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and Capello: Portrait of a Winner.

Gabriele Marcotti

Adolfo García Ortega

Gabrielle Hatfield

Gabriel Chevallier

Gabrielle Hamilton

About Gabrielle Griffiths: Gabrielle Griffiths grew up in Aberdeenshire and now lives in Brighton. She was a Madeleine Milburn Agency mentee in 2021 and is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

Gabrielle Griffiths

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Norman Sherry

The much-anticipated third and final volume of Norman Sherry's biography follows the tireless wanderings of Graham Greene, the writer's final forays into the fulminating trouble spots of the world which beckoned as sirens all his days. From the perils of Batista's Cuba, the privations of the Belgian Congo and the tumult of Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama, to his confrontation with the French mafia, his travels in Spain and, finally, his quiet death in Switzerland at the age of eighty-six. The rigour and attention to detail that gained praise for the first two volumes remains undiminished as Sherry retraces Greene's footsteps, criss-crossing the globe to visit the places that inspired Greene's novels and meeting the people who provided the models for some of literature's most memorable characters: the whiskey priest; the honorary consul; the zany aunt. Never losing sight of the very real religious, emotional and political struggles that made up Greene's complicated personality - his constantly questioned but never abandoned Catholicism, his two long-term affairs with married women, his determination to stand up for the victims of injustice - Sherry illuminates Greene's mind, methods and motivation with an unswervingly critical, yet always compassionate eye. With exclusive access to Greene's letters, journals and dream-diaries, Norman Sherry has written a monumental tribute to one of the greatest of English writers. The three volumes of The Life of Graham Greene will remain the standard work on Greene for decades to come.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume Three

1955 - 1991

Margaret Reynolds

Jonathan Noakes

In Vintage Living Texts teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Sebastian Faulks. This guide will deal with his themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will be accompanied with likely exam questions, and contexts and comparisons - as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Sebastian Faulks

The Essential Guide

Adam Thirlwell

The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism - a history of language learning. Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. 
 
Miss Herbert provides a map to the imaginary country shared between writers and readers. For translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. Miss Herbert explores the solutions to this conundrum. 
 
This book demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. And it includes a slim appendix: 'Mademoiselle O', a story by Vladimir Nabokov, which he worked on in three languages, over thirty years, and whose original French version is now translated into English by Adam Thirlwell. 
 
 Adam Thirlwell was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013.

Miss Herbert

Jane Dunn

Antonia White is best known for her masterpiece Frost in May, for having come back from Bedlam and madness, and for the public feud between her daughters over the editing of her diaries. This is the first biography to tell the complete story of a life courageously lived against most difficult odds: 'Oh I DID want to be happy as a woman...But I'm a monster and must accept being one. Not all writers are monsters. But my kind is.' 
 
With full access to White's unexpurgated diaries, the analysis journals, the asylum records and her voluminous correspondence, Jane Dunn has explored the woman and the writer, the persecutor and the victim. This biography charts Antonia White's ambivalence about her parents; her three marriages, two of them unconsummated; her lovers; her friendships with poets and writers like Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas and Bertrand Russell; her secret war work; her bizarre thraldom to 'dominating women'; her harrowing relationship with her two daughters; and her endurance of the ravages of manic depression, experienced without the benefits of modern day therapy. 
 
This is the story of a woman who - two generations too soon - attempted to live the modern female life of single parent and working mother, but longed for the artistic and intellectual stage. Antonia White wrestled throughout with the large questions of faith, the attractions and repulsions of Catholicism, the problems of being a woman and an artist. And over it all lowered the threat of madness. This book reveals her as a woman unafraid of extreme experience and honest enough to accept the consequences: self-obsessed, funny, fascinating and tragic - and ultimately heroic.

Antonia White

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Martin Amis. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Martin Amis, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Amis's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Martin Amis

Ruth Padel

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Poems from The Mara Crossing

David Bellos

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing. 
 
Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice. 
 
This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar. 
 
In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.

Romain Gary

A Tall Story

Valerie Lester

'Phiz' - Hablot Knight Browne - was the great illustrator of Dickens' fiction. For over twenty-three years they worked together, and Phiz's drawings brought to life a galaxy of much-loved characters, from Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby and Mr Micawber, to Little Nell and David Copperfield. But, from the mystery of his birth onwards, Phiz himself led a life as rich as any novel. 
 
In this vivid, lively memoir - the first full biography, long-awaited by Victorian scholars - his great-great-granddaughter Valerie Browne Lester tracks the struggles of the abandoned Browne family and follows Phiz's path to marriage and fame, his travels around England and Ireland and work with Dickens, Lever, Trollope and others, and his colourful private life. 
 
Based on a mass of unpublished material, this enchanting book, packed with surprising and delicious illustrations, is a perfect present for all who love Dickens and enjoy the hidden byways of Victorian life.

Phiz

The Man Who Drew Dickens

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams begins his brilliantly perceptive study of the English novel in the 1840s, a period of rapid social change brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democratic reform, and the growth of cities and towns. Unsettling, indeed critical, for individuals and communities alike, this process of change prompted the novelists of the time to explore new forms of writing. The genius of Dickens, the powerful originality of the Bront? sisters, the passionate vision of George Eliot – all gave new force and humanity to the English novel, whose roots in the evolving community Raymond Williams proceeds to trace through the work of Hardy, Gissing and Wells, and on to D.H. Lawrence.

The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence

Zachary Leader

In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. 
 
Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis's childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. 
 
He explores Amis's fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis's work. As the editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, hailed in The Sunday Telegraph as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.

The Life of Kingsley Amis

Helen Carr

The Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War. As T. S. Eliot was to say, appropriately re-invoking the Imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry's point de repère, the landmark venture that inaugurated Anglo-American literary modernism. A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the twenties began, these 'verse revolutionaries' received both abuse and acclaim, but their poetry, fragmented, pared-down, elliptical yet direct, exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, and contributed vitally to the transformation of American and British cultural life in those crucial years. 
 
Among those involved were the Americans Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, and the British T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence. On the edges of the story are figures such as W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. They came from very different class backgrounds, a heterogeneous mélange then only possible in a great metropolis like London. 
 
The Verse Revolutionaries traces the passionate interactions, love affairs and bitter quarrels of these aspiring poets from 1905 to 1917. Helen Carr unpicks the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what were the fissures that eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. Her compelling account challenges the conventional view of Imagism, and offers an acute analysis of the poetry, of the psychology of the individuals involved, and of the evolution and emergence of a transformative cultural movement.

The Verse Revolutionaries

Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists

Frederick Brown

Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary outraged France's right-thinking bourgeoisie when it was first published in 1857, is brought to life in Frederick Brown's new biography in all his singularity and brilliance. Frederick Brown's portrayal is of an artist fraught with contradictions - his wit and bravado coexisting with great vulnerability. 
 
A sedentary man by nature, Flaubert undertook epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East. He could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to a beautifully cadenced prose. While energized by his camaraderie with male friends, such as Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Zola and Maupassant, he depended for emotional nurturing upon maternal women, most notably George Sand. 
 
Nineteenth-century France literally put Flaubert on trial for portraying 'lewd behaviour' in Madame Bovary. But it also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin, probably hastening his sudden death at the age of fifty-nine. Although writing was something like torture for him, it preoccupied his mind and dominated his life. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he achieved with Madame Bovary, but adamantly refused to sacrifice to it his ideal of artistic integrity. 
 
Of Flaubert's life, his inner world, his times and his legacy, Frederick Brown's magisterial biography is a revelation. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize for biography and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Flaubert

A Life

James Lasdun

James Lasdun's third book of poems explores the themes and tensions of his last two with a new boldness and exuberance, in a series of poems about life in the Catskill mountains outside Woodstock, where the author moved with his family some years ago. 
 
Questions of exile and belonging, cutting ties and forming new bonds, figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world of the mountain wilderness - at once a stunning companion and a ferocious competitor. Out of this - 'the need to carve out a niche for ourselves;/our singular relation to what we love' - rises the book's central image: the chainsaw. Very much a real machine (given to the alarmed poet by his wife), it also comes to form a complex symbol in which all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical, brilliance. 
 
A brilliantly assured, deftly lyrical sequence, Landscape with Chainsaw melds passion with wit, the classical with the quotidian, in a thrilling meditation on history, love, cultural identity and the anxiety of displacement. As an examination of the complexities of deracination and domesticity, it marks the matured genius of one of England's most important poets.

Landscape With Chainsaw

Harry Ricketts

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. 
 
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Strange Meetings

The Poets of the Great War

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 
 
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. 
 
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

The Mara Crossing

Alan Jenkins

ALAN JENKINS - POERTY IS EXHILARATING. . . . . IT IS CHARGED WITH EROTIC ENERGY, RAGE, SORROW AND CONFUSION. - DAVID LEHMAN The poeoms in Alan Jenkin's magnificent new collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age. The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure -his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions - acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.

The Drift

Neil Roberts

Peter Redgrove

The work of the poet Peter Redgrove is one of the great unexplored treasures of late twentieth century literature. His prolific output presents an intriguing variety of personae: magician, scientist, lover, psychologist, joker, madman. It is only now, with the publication of his Collected Poems and this biography, that we can see how and why these personae developed - and discover the full depth and range of this visionary writer. 
 
Born into an apparently conventional middle-class family that was in reality deeply disturbed, the poet finally emerged: transforming himself from the neurotic, Oedipal young scientist, through a process of mental breakdown, insulin coma therapy, erotic revelation and the discovery of poetic companionship at Cambridge - and particularly his friendship and rivalry with Ted Hughes. 
 
Neil Roberts explores the inner story of this emergence, and Redgrove's later development through marriage, family life, the fellowship of the 'Group', alcoholic excess, infidelity and marital breakdown to his triumphant later partnership with Penelope Shuttle. We also discover, for the first time, some darker secrets: his fascination with Aleister Crowley, his damaged and damaging relationship with his father, and the lifelong sexual fetish which he called the 'Game'. Drawing on the poet's intimate journals and correspondence, and interviews with family, friends and colleagues, A Lucid Dreamer tells the exceptionally inward and revealing story of an astonishing creative life.

A Lucid Dreamer

The Life of Peter Redgrove

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers, students and any lover of literature will find the essential guide to the major works of Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch's themes, genre and narrative techniques are put under scrutiny and the emphasis is on providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Amongst many other features you'll find inspirational reading plans and contextual material, suggested complementary and comparative reading and an indispensable glossary. Featured texts: The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, The Bell'I didn't realise just how good the series was until I started working closely with it.  The questions are so thoughtful and probing-the texts really do occupy their own niche between guides purely for teachers and the ubiquitous student crib, and are much better than either' Head of English, Newington College, Australia

Iris Murdoch

David Lodge

Novelist, critic, lecturer, reviewer, man-about-conferences, David Lodge, as both analyst and practitioner, is one of our foremost experts in the forms of fiction. He is also an uncommonly sympathetic and informed observer of the passing scene, and his penetrating vision is set in a consistently ironic frame. David Lodge's humour can be a devastating weapon, but it is continually engaging because as often as not the sniper's sights are trained on the author himself, and on the curiously mobile, cosmopolitan yet specialist world he inhabits. 
 
 
The essays and reviews collected in this volume are selected from the occasional writings over a span of twenty years, and are all prompted by an impulse - or an invitation - to "write on" some specific topic: a book, a film, an anniversary, a trip abroad. They also reflect the drive of the professional to keep writing, "to keep the muscles of composition exercised." 
 
 
The pieces collected here are designed for a wide audience, and most focus, in more or less direct ways, on Lodge's own work as a novelist. Enthusiasts will take especial pleasure in discovering sources for episodes from his novels, in tracing how reality mutates into fiction - or how on occasion, the process works the other way round.

Write On

Occasional Essays

Gerard Woodward

In Island to Island, his third collection of poetry for Chatto, Gerard Woodward ventures into more hostile, less familiar territory. An Arabian desert, the moon, thinly-populated archipelagos are all visited in what emerges as an investigation into the nature of social space. A giraffe trapper finds that a successful trap must closely resemble a giraffe's own home; the 'suburban glass' of starter-home conservatories glazes and crysallises the lives of newly-weds. With his characteristic exuberance and ability to stand the world on its head, Woodward combines tichly imagined poems about half-invented lands with poetry that transforms the ordinary into the fantastical, where baths become oceans and ceilings lunar landscapes. Nor is the body exempt from this exploration of borders and limits. In one poem, two 'gurning' contestants find that they've overstepped some boundary of humanness and in 'The Madness of Heracles', a long retelling of the myth of the twelve labours, human strength is put to the test in a poem which evolves into a rhapsody of love, loss, toil and redemption.

Island To Island

A. S. Byatt

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways to the art of Cézanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage.

Portraits In Fiction

Norma Clarke

Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs.  He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well:  Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney.  It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters.  It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors.  Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case.  Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.

Dr Johnson's Women

Roberto Calasso

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? 
 
In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.? 
 
The culmination of the author's lifelong fascination with Kafka, K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka.

Anne Carson

Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ('a spellbinding achievement' - Susan Sontag): a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's intoxicating mixture of opposites - the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. 
 
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson re-invents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St Augustine and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And, in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother. 
 
With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that 'the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection', Men in the Off Hours is profound, provocative and unforgettable.

Men In The Off Hours

The years from 1939 to 1955 proved to be the most prolific of Graham Greene's life.  In The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II, Norman Sherry continues his engrossing account, delving deeply and emerging with a portrait of the author at the height of both his spying and literary careers. Greene produced some of his best novels during this time - The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American - and saw the filming of The Fallen Idol and The Third Man.  The same period encompasses his passionate affair with the beautiful American Catherine Watson, who was married to a British peer, the disintegration of his marriage, his long relationship with Dorothy Glover, his activities as a secret agent and his forays into the conflicts in Kenya, Malaya, and French Indo-China.  As with The Life of Graham Greene Volume I:  1904-1939, Norman Sherry succeeds in unlocking the mystery of Greene's character and the alchemic nature of his creative genius.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume 2

1939-1955

Robert Fraser

The poet George Barker was convinced that his biography could never be written.  'I've stirred the facts around too much,' he told Robert Fraser. 'It simply can't be done.' Eliot wrote of his 'genius'.  Yeats thought him the most interesting poet of his generation.  Dylan Thomas envied his power over women.  War trapped him in Japan.  In America he conducted one of the most celebrated love affairs of the century.  He fathered fifteen children in several countries, three during one battle-torn summer.  By the 1950s he was the toast of Soho.  Barker was Catholic and bohemian, frank and elusive, tender and boisterous.  In Eliot's phrase, he was 'a most peculiar fellow.' Robert Fraser's biography offers both a portrait of a talented, tormented and irresistibly entertaining man, and a broad cultural landscape.  Around the central figure cluster painters like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Johnny Minton and the 'Roberts' Colquhoun and MacBryde; writers such as Dylan Thomas, Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Smart, whose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept hymns their liaison; the lugubrious humorist Jeffrey Bernard.  After closing time at the Colony Room, Minton declared, they had to sweep up the jokes.

The Chameleon Poet

A Life of George Barker

Hedley Twidle

Ten years ago, I was commissioned by a famous poet-editor to write a profile of Coetzee for a London review. At the time, the offer was a big break, and could have led to great things. I was fresh out of university and the editor was high-up at Faber and Faber, a talent scout for The New Yorker. But it never got written. 
 
Instead of providing a controlled and judicious survey of the oeuvre, I found myself obsessed by minor details on the outskirts of his work. The grim memoir Youth (2002) had just appeared and I wrote at length about the stockings full of clotting cheese that young “John” hangs up in his kitchen – proof of his extreme thriftiness, in life as in prose. The fish fingers that he fries in olive oil in a London garret, trying to emulate the Mediterranean diet of Ford Madox Ford: these finer points of domestic economy seemed laden with meaning. So this became my account of stalking the South African writer JM Coetzee on page and in the halls of academe.

Getting Past Coetzee

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Jeanette Winterson. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Jeanette Winterson, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Winterson's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Jeanette Winterson

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Passions Of The Mind

Selected Writings

John Hartley Williams

Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe, and writes eloquently about being English, and staying English, in a continental climate, through all the upheavals of the last fifteen years. 
 
Alert to the intricacies and ironies of the language, to the musculature of politics and passion, these poems are chronicles of change, wired to the energies of jazz and science fiction, yet the under-song is a threnody for the loss of a kind of Englishness - voiced powerfully in a moving elegy for the poet Ken Smith. While there is no diminishing of his comic brio, no dulling of his incisive, questioning intelligence, Blues finds John Hartley Williams taking on subjects of new depth and complexity - while maintaining his characteristic lightness of touch, imagination and profound originality.

Blues

Gabriel's Inferno

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

You, Me & ADHD

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

Journey Across Japan

Abandoning a Cat

Features

A guide to magical realism

Image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his book covers

Reading lists

Where to start reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez's books

The best proposals in books

Image showing some of the best books of 2024, including Think Again, PATRIOT, The City and its Uncertain Walls and An African History of Africa

Must-read books of 2024: A look back at the year's most exciting releases

Where to start reading Haruki Murakami's books

Penguin readers suggest one book they would recomment: from The Book Thief to One Hundred Years of Solitude

Showing results for: ‘Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter