New Releases by Anthony Burgess

‘I’m working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III’s time ... The fourteenth century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than hey-nonny nostalgia’ – Anthony Burgess, 1973 The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life. This rambunctious book, based on a completed screenplay by Anthony Burgess, showcases Adam Roberts in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess’s best work.

Sometimes when I''m at work and waiting for customers I think about the two of us living like kings and not bothering about the future. Because there may not be any future to bother about, you know. Not for anybody, one of these days. And it''s a wicked world. Average couple Janet and Howard''s lives begin to unravel when Howard''s photographic memory helps win him a gameshow fortune. Janet doesn''t want their lives to change that much. She''s quite happy working at the supermarket, cooking for her husband three times a day and watching quiz shows in the evening. But once Howard unleashes his photographic brain on the world, the once modest used-car salesman can''t seem to stop. And what he sees as the logical conclusion to his success isn''t something Janet can agree to. Burgess''s 1961 darkly comic satire of drab English consumerism is adapted for the stage by Lucia Cox. This edition was published to coincide with the US premiere at the Brits Off-Broadway Festival, at 59E59 Theatre, New York, in May 2015.

"Wildly inventive" —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve A magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare’s love life, following young Will’s maturation into sex and writing. A playful romp, it is at the same time a serious look at the forces that midwife art, the effects of time and place, and the ordinariness that is found side by side with the extraordinariness of genius.

"There are so few genuinely entertaining novels around that we ought to cheer whenever one turns up. Continuous, fizzing energy…Honey for the Bears is a triumph." —Kingsley Amis, New York Times A sharply written satire, Honey for the Bears sends an unassuming antiques dealer, Paul Hussey, to Russia to do one final deal on the black market as a favor for a dead friend''s wife. Even on the ship''s voyage across, the Russian sensibility begins to pervade: lots of secrets and lots of vodka. When his American wife is stricken by a painful rash and he is interrogated at his hotel by Soviet agents who know that he is trying to sell stylish synthetic dresses to the masses starved for fashion, his precarious inner balance is thrown off for good. More drink follows, discoveries of his wife''s illicit affair with another woman, and his own submerged sexual feelings come breaking through the surface, bubbling up in Russian champagne and caviar.

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

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.

Collected interviews with the British author of A Clockwork Orange, ReJoyce: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, and other works

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.

Revolutionary Sonnets explores themes of violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both sobering and funny.

(Applause Books). Anthony Burgess was the author of over 50 books, including his best known novel, "A Clockwork Orange." But Burgess always emphasized music as the ruling passion in his creative life. Largely self-taught in music, Burgess composed his first symphony before he was twenty, many years before his first novel, and he was the composer of over 65 musical works. In these deeply insightful meditations, the renowned writer explores the meaning of music, the intention of the composer and the process of composition, and the seemingly elusive relationships between literature and music. Burgess shows how "the process of literary composition are revealed by the writers themselves" and then gathers evidence to understand the "inexplicable magic" of the details of the operation of music what is music''s "intelligibility"? From Shakespeare to the lyric verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the modernists T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to the modern lyricists Lorenz Hart and Stephen Sondheim, Burgess reveals how prose writers have struggled to tap the inherent musicality of their material. This treasured classic, at last back in print, provides a fascinating perspective on the mutually enriching relationship of these two creative arts by a man who mastered them both.

Hemingway''s great achievement was to free the novel from all the languid decoration and cozy indirectness that was its early twentieth-century inheritance. His terse prose taught the writer to engage life to the fullest in order to write about it, and his own life was the perfect demonstration of that principle. Reissued to coincide with the centenary of Hemingway''s birth, Anthony Burgess''s insightful biography traces the rapidly changing scene from a happy, complacent childhood to the grim reality of the First World War and the vulgar unreality of the Second; from the Paris of the 1920s to the Spain of Civil War and the excitements of African safari to the somber last years in Cuba. Hemingway was rich and successful from an early age, yet public acclaim and even the Nobel Prize could not disguise the fact that he was a moody, suffering, and sometimes vicious figure--a man who was finally unable to live with his own image.

Dr. Edwin Spindrift, a linguist, decides to escape from the hospital the night before his brain tumor surgery is scheduled and discovers a world of people exists outside his universe of words.

BYRNE is Anthony Burgess''s fianl work: an epic verse novel. It tells the story of a rampant Irish artist who, in the early years of this century, goes rapidly to the bad, philandering at every opportunity, selling his talents as a composer and painter, and ending up in Hitler''s Third Reich. He then vanishes and the story passes to his children, including twin sons, one a doubting priest, the other sick of an incapacitating disease, who move across the troubled face of contemporary Europe before encountering their father in one final apocalyptic confrontation. Brilliantly readable, enormously funny and full of passion and energy, it is also Anthony Burgess''s last powerful statement of life and art.

Homage to Mozart on the occasion of the bicentennial of his death with celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, fragments of film script, and part rumination on the mystery of music.

A lively attempt to understand the meaning of music through a celestial dialogue with arguably the world''s greatest composer.

The narrative begins in 1959, with the author''s return to England from Brunei and, after the prognosis which gave him a year to live is confounded, the start of his professional writing career. It ends in 1983. The book is the sequel to "Little Wilson and Big God."

In a sweeping historical novel moving from the sinking of the "Titanic" to World War II and the birth of Israel, two families--one Welsh and one Irish--are bound together by love, friendship, and an ancient myth.

This novel is one of Anthony Burgess''s most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life.

Anthony Burgess provides a cogent and passionate argument for each of the books on this controversial, stimulating list.

Enderby is a dyspeptic British poet, 56 years old, and The Clockwork Testament is an account of his last day alive. The day in question is a cold one in February. He spends it in New York City, where for the past several months he''s been working as a visiting professor of English literature and composing a long poem about St. Augustine and Pelagius.

Presented without chapter breaks, the plot weaves together three storylines. One follows Leon Trotsky on a journey to New York City shortly before the Russian Revolution of 1917. This story is written as the libretto of an Off-Broadway musical. A second tale covers the life and career of Sigmund Freud and includes portrayals of Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing. The third part is set in the future, shortly before the impact of a rogue, extrasolar planet with the Earth. Because of the latter story line, it is considered a work of fantastic fiction.

Anthony Burgess'' epic work revolves around a writer, Kenneth Marchal Toomey, and the man he is linked to through family ties, Carlo Campanati, an earthy Italian priest destined to become Pope. Toomey, now in his 80s recalls the past.

A fictionalized historic account recalling the story of Jesus from his life to his death.

An English businessman returns from the Orient to find his country infested with greed, boredom, and corruption