Most Popular Books by Anthony burgess

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

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."

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.

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

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.

"Fine, sly, rich comedy." —New York Times Book Review Dr. Edwin Spindrift, a very ordinary lecturer in linguistics, has been sent home from Burma with a brain tumor. Closer to words than people, his sense of reality is further altered by his condition. The night before he is to be operated on, Spindrift decides—shaven-headed, shirtless, and penniless—to postpone the surgery by escaping from the hospital. Things and people he hardly knew existed outside of his dictionaries swoop down on him as he careens through adventures in nighttime London.

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called "elephantine fun" to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon''s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven''s Third "Eroica" Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

"In Earthly Powers Burgess created his masterpiece. At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power--Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into honored, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. Through the lives of these two modern men Burgess explores the very essence of power. As each pursues his career--one to sainthood, one to wealthy exile--their relationship becomes the heart of a narrative that incorporates almost everyone of fame and distinction in the social, literary, and political life of America and Europe. This astonishing company is joined together by the art of a great novelist into an explosive and entertaining tour de force that will captivate fans of sweeping historic fiction." -- Publisher.

(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.

Enderby, now called (after his mother) Hogg, is presented in this sequel as a barman in a big London Hotel. Unexpectedly the poetic gift returns. Moreover, Hogg seems to be involved in the assassination of a famous pop-singer, and this forces him to flee, resuming - since it is in his passport - his old identity. He discovers, on a flight to Tangier, that his betrayer Rawcliffe (who stole the plot of a narrative poem and turned it into a horror film) seems to be the patron of a beach-cafe in that exotic resort. If Enderby is to put away for murdering a pop-singer, he might as well murder Rawcliffe also.

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.