Bøger i British Literature serien

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "e;the sex war"e; is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

The tenth child of a fantasist mother and an absent millionaire, Matty Crickholme is growinginto a sexually bewildered, neurotic young man. Through the collected paraphernalia of anunconventional childhood, Alex Kovacs creates a quirky, kaleidoscopic rumination on family andhow it shapes us-for better or worse.Sexology follows the strange, wonderful, fluxional world of the Crickholmes, wherenonconformism is celebrated, siblings form autonomous republics, and eccentricity reignssupreme. The Crickholme siblings youthful exploits take them on myriad paths: a hermeticpsychic, a dog trainer, an ice cream purveyoress, a missing person. Between memories,factoids, letters, and old photographs, Matty investigates how their offbeat rearing made themthe adults they became, and how fantasy and convention collide. Alex Kovacs's writings have received acclaim for their invention, wit, and astute observations ofour absurd world. Sexology brings this intellectual playfulness to the story of the Crickholmeswith a unique prose that evokes the complex emotional landscapes of W.G. Sebald's novels andthe sometimes-gentle, sometimes-devastating style of Susanna Clarke. The result is anentrancing, incomparable medley.

November may be said to have four protagonists: a group of night-shift workers in Southeast France; their friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances; the factory in which they work; the work itself. The focus is on two and a half hours during one evening in November 1976 and the plastic die-casting workshop where the men are employed. Staggering in scope, November is a virtuoso performance¿a contemporary take on the classical modernist novel, anatomizing the ways we live, think, and labor: what we've lost, and what we're losing.

Man + Doctor is Nicholas Wadley's wordless story of encounters with doctors, from the patient's attempts to avoid the scalpel, to, once surgery becomes inevitable, watching himself learn to cope with days and weeks spent in hospital beds.

Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare", she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts".

This 900-page survey of world literature, "e;From Confucius' Day to Our Own"e; (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars and teachers give a false sense of literature, Ford brings alive the pleasures of reading by writing about books he is passionate about. Beginning at the beginning - with ancient Egyptian and Chinese literature and the Bible - Ford works his way through classical literature, the writings of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, continuing up to the major writers of his own day like Ezra Pound, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. With his encyclopedic reading and expertise in the techniques of writing, Ford is a reliable and entertaining guide. Ford also includes a chapter on publishers and booksellers, noting the key roles they play in literature's existence. Novelist Alexander Theroux (Darconville's Cat, An Adultery) has written an insightful introduction for this reissue, the first time this monumental book has been made available in paperback.

Man + Book is Nicholas Wadley's wordless story of humorous and ironic encounters with books.

Man + Doctor is Nick Wadley s wordless story of encounters with doctors, from the patient s attempts to avoid the scalpel, to, once surgery becomes inevitable, watching himself learn to cope with days and weeks spent in hospital beds.

Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel-written in the '50s and never before published-Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

"Accident," Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an "accident," Mosley gives us an unforgettable view of life at the top or tip of the academic heights, in addition to a moving story of love and betrayal.

What begins as a driving holiday in Northern France for two Scotswomen turns into a caustic and funny account of dysfunctional relationships - both between men and women and between women friends. Cassie and Rona - in their late thirties, both single and childless - are on each other's nerves from the moment they cross the Channel: Cassie is testy and cynical, Rona patient and plodding. Both are self-conscious of the fact that they seem to fit the stereotype of two "spinsters" linked by loneliness, and consequently rebel against the notion that a woman needs a man to feel "complete". Faced with the dilemma of "fancying men and not liking them very much", the women ponder the alternatives as they endure one tourist nightmare after another.

A novel about the effects of moral and social and experiments.

Part political thriller and part love story, this work explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the big events".

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

In acclaimed author Eva Figes' inventive reshaping of the pop psychological thriller, her fifth novel opens as Nelly Dean, a middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia, checks into a small-town hotel with a suitcase full of cash and no idea where it - or she - came from. Distrustful of everyone from the waiter who serves her lunch to a store clerk who claims to know her from grade school, Nelly fears she is part of a conspiracy, although she is strangely indifferent to the clues that might explain her puzzling circumstances. Part dark comedy, part mystery novel, Nelly's Version offers an unsettling journey into the mind of a witty, intelligent woman stuck in a pastless present.

Takes on what, for most novelists, has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious beliefs.

Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

A Scathing Satire On Psychology, Identity Theory And Class Prejudice; Cards of Identity is a scathing satire of psychology, identity theory, and class prejudice. The plot centers on an annual meeting of the Identity Club, a group of psychologists who come together to present "case histories" promoting their chosen theory of identity. These case studies (three of which are presented in the novel) are not scientific treatises, but fictional representations of characters in line with the author's biases. In fact, members of the Club aren't allowed to interact with actual patients when creating their stories. Surrounding this meeting is the equally bizarre story of the local townspeople, who are brainwashed and transformed into servants for the convention, and who end the book with a show-stopping Shakespearian play.