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Sex and Language
“Within the last four years, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the two Tropics of Henry Miller have at last been allowed to circulate freely. Both writers use the so-called ‘obscene’ words extensively, and the publicity given to the Lady Chatterley case, as well as the character . . .” read more
The Essays of James Baldwin
“Reading Baldwin has been, for me, a strange, complex experience. It was one containing a mixture of agony, pride (sometimes real, often false and embarrassing), displeasure, envy, admiration, and profound disagreement. I have confessed this as a warning to the reader who might be expecting a rational, impartial . . .” read more
Vanguard Culture
“‘William Burroughs—extremely gifted writer—almost a giant compared with Kerouac, etc—correctly described by the introduction as being in the tradition of Dostoievsky, Kafka and Beckett—his unbridled intellective violence and genuinely modern imagination make him a good interpreter and excellent poet of this epoch of ours: an epoch which projects . . .” read more
Tomorrow
“Sadegh Hedayat is the leading Persian writer of the century. He was born in Teheran in 1903 and committed suicide in Paris in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl was written in 1930, after he had already travelled widely in Europe and absorbed European literary influences. The Kafkaesque . . .” read more
Introduction to Attila Jozsef
“No collection of poems by Attila Jozsef has ever been published in English, although he is certainly one of the major poets of the century. He was born in Budapest in 1905. His father was a worker in a soapfactory, his mother was a scrub-woman. While he was . . .” read more
The Italian Novel
“Anti-Fascism, the War and the Resistance, transformed Italian literature. Proof of this can be seen in the fact that the novel has become its principal form, to the detriment of the short story and poetry. But this is only an external aspect; the essential phenomenon is a complete . . .” read more
Scott Fitzgerald
“The best writing of most great novelists seems their natural level, and their worst writing an unfortunate lapse. With Fitzgerald it is just the opposite: when one considers the bulk of his work, he seems to be a naturally bad writer who miraculously produced two great novels. Certain . . .” read more
The Top and The Bottom
“The Old Iron Bridge still made a shortcut through from Slippy Lane to a steep climb called the Ping-Pong by the residents centred around the Parkside Baths. Besides the swimming pool, it catered for people without bathrooms, and got busier towards weekend with Latvians lodging nearby and coloured . . .” read more
The New Poetry of Socialism
“Gabriel Pearson’s recent article on present-day poetry and the trend poetry has followed since the rise of romanticism contained some striking new formulations of a thesis familiar enough from Plekhanov’s analysis of the French Romantics in his Art and Social Life, T. S. Eliot’s essay on Blake, or . . .” read more
Romanticism and Contemporary Poetry
“It is not just antiquarian to assert that any study of contemporary poetry must begin with romanticism. We are talking about English poetry; hence our points of reference will be English Romanticism. I am not concerned with direct historical antecedents. Rather with establishing an astonishing transformation of attitude . . .” read more
From the Highest Camp
“Nothing in this bright region melts or shifts. The local names are concepts: the Ravine, Pemmican Ridge, North Col, Death Camp, they mean The streetless rise, the dazzling abstract drifts, To which particular names adhere by chance, From custom lightly, not from character. We stand on a . . .” read more
'Franny and Zooey' and J.D.Salinger
“In Pretty Mouth and Green my Eyes, one of the stories from For Esmé with Love and Squalor, Arthur describes himself as ‘a stupid, fouled-up, twentieth-century son of a bitch’. This has been J. D. Salinger’s constant estimate of how people live in modern America. It is possible, . . .” read more
Iris Murdoch and the Romantic Novel
“This article began as a review of A Severed Head, and got mixed up with my re-reading of a short essay that Irish Murdoch wrote just over a year ago for Encounter, called Against Dryness. I have always thought of Iris Murdoch as a romantic novelist. Yet Against . . .” read more
A Theatre for Our Time
“from october to January, the Theatre du Champs Elysees in Paris will be occupied by the company of Roger Planchon’s Theatre de la Cite. This is an event of European importance, and a must for anyone preoccupied with the problems of trying to construct an authentic culture . . .” read more
Talking to N.F. Simpson
“N. F.Simpson was born in 1919, which makes him somewhat older than most of the playwrights who came on the scene at about the same time as he did. In fact, he turned to playwriting only in 1956—just before the announcements of the Observer Competition, in which his . . .” read more
Where Is the Ginger Man?
“from The Ginger Man to Fairy Tales of New York, J. P. Donleavy has traced a wily, subterranean trail from joy to ambivalence, from sensual and sensuous pleasure to partial withdrawal, from anarchy to compromise. Donleavy’s first book, published in 1958, announced a rare, rich, disciplined . . .” read more
Of No Fixed Abode
“it was time they were all out. Some of them even seemed to have somewhere to go. A few left for good, with the light hardly-to-be-counted as luggage of the vagrant, the scratched suitcases of the casual labourers looking squashed in at the corners like soap-cartons, but . . .” read more
Stand: War Poets
“writing in NLR 5, Raymond Williams proposed a solution to an old problem, “the plight of the Little Magazines”. He suggests that positive intervention (to replace jaded liberal passive lamentation) into the publishing and distribution of books and magazines is the only effective way to counter “the . . .” read more
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away and recoil . . .” read more