Most Popular Books by Anthony Burgess

Donation trade.

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

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.

A survey of language, how it operates now, how it got to be that way, how it will develop in the future, Shakespeare''s pronunciation, English newly generated abroad, everyday speech, and the place of English in the world family of languages.

(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.

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce.

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.

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

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.

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.

Novel in verse form telling the story of a rampant Irish artist who in the early years of the century goes rapidly to the bad, then disappears in Hitler''s Third Reich. The story then moves to his children who comb Europe to find and confront him.

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

Before Shakespeare in Love, there was Anthony Burgess''s Nothing Like the Sun: a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare''s love life.

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

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."

Himself a well know writer, Burgess traces Hemingway''s life through the world wars, Paris of the 1920s, the Spanish Civil War, and the last years in Cuba. He describes both the compulsive super-masculine braggart and the sensitive literary artist. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.

Commentary on Joyce for the average reader.

"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 tragedy of Oedipus, who unknowingly slays his father and marries his mother, is one of the mythical cornerstones of Western civilization. Nicholas Rudall''s new translation remains true to Sophocles original text while fashioning a language of grace and power, with contemporary players and theatergoers in mind.

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.