Best of
English-Literature

1981

The Collected Stories


Elizabeth Bowen - 1981
    Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely obcerved children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen's reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives—rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft—transcend their time and place.

Conversations


Czesław Miłosz - 1981
    He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity.In the years of loneliness and labor, Milosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Milosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Milosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility.Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Cortland Review.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830


Marilyn Butler - 1981
    Butler relates the French and American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the expansion of agriculture, trade, and industry, and growing economic and social pressures to the cultural forces which shaped their work. She reveals the common factors which engaged the separate efforts of so many individual creative minds, and the fierce personal and artistic politics of an age in the midst of profound change. Demonstrating that the literature produced during this dynamic, restless time is not as homogenous as is generally assumed, Butler illuminates the ways in which these various experimental works reflected radically new sensibilities and aspirations.

A Good Man in Africa


William Boyd - 1981
    His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.

Our Man in Havana; The End of the Affair; It's A Battlefield; England Made Me; The Ministry of Fear; Brighton Rock


Graham Greene - 1981
    

Plays 2: The Caretaker / The Dwarfs / The Collection / The Lover / Night School / Trouble in the Works / The Black and White / Request Stop / Last to Go / Special Offer


Harold Pinter - 1981
    A collection of five Pinter plays which also contains five revue sketches written during the same period.

Hand Me a Fig Leaf


James Hadley Chase - 1981
    As they prove to be uninterested, he turns instead to Colonel Parnell of the Parnell Detective Agency. It seems at first to be a simple case of a missing person but they soon find themselves in the middle of a complicated web of deceit, intrigue and murder.