New Releases by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies is Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, for which he seems not to have held out high hopes. It was written during a period of personal trauma—the break-up of his short-lived first marriage—and many see in the novel’s fragmentary scenes and frail relationships the effects of Waugh’s deep emotional disappointments. It’s also one of the most explicitly modernist of Waugh’s books. In spite of this sobering context, the novel is full of humor and ironic detachment from the sometimes tragic moments which punctuate the story. The narrative thread mostly follows the fortunes of Adam Symes, his sometime fiancée, Nina Blount, and an assortment of their friends and acquaintances—a coterie of “Bright Young People,” as Waugh sometimes refers to them collectively. Troubles with money, vagaries in society, questionable morals, and a fondness for drink dog the characters as they stumble from scene to scene. Later readers have found more to admire in the novel than its author did, and it remains a firm favorite among Waugh’s many fans. It was adapted for film by Stephen Fry in 2003 under the title Bright Young Things. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Fueled by idealism and eagerness to contribute to the war effort, Guy Crouchback becomes attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and respect must be paid to the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is soon followed by the bitterness of Crete, where chaos reigns and a difficult evacuation must be accomplished.—Goodreads.com.

Waugh brings some of his best characters back for another romp. Against the backdrop of the Phoney War, Alistair Trumpington wants only the chance to fight for a worthy cause, but instead he finds himself stuck in a never-ending series of military maneuvers, getting him nowhere closer to any front.Meanwhile, the scoundrel Basil Seal sees the burgeoning war as an opportunity to help only himself.

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh offers the first scholarly edition of Waugh''s work, bringing together all of his extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, parerga, drawings, and designs. No other edition of a British novelist has been undertaken on this scale. Only 15% of Waugh''s letters have previously been published. Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh''s grandson, is editing a twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence for the series, intercalating over 10,000 letters with the complete, unexpurgated diaries. All volumes will be beautifully produced, and have comprehensive introductions and detailed annotation. Fiction and non-fiction volumes will also contain a full account of each text''s manuscript development and textual variants. The Complete Works will revolutionize Waugh studies, and offer new insights for twentieth-century literary and cultural studies generally. Waughs works are placed in their rich literary and historical context, enabling readers to appreciate for the first time the range and complexity of his thinking and artistic practice, and linking this to the work of his contemporaries in Britain, America and Europe. This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh''s published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text''s manuscript development and textual variants. The edition''s General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh''s grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence. In a writing career populated with characters and situations drawn closely from life, A Little Learning is unique. It is Waugh''s only finished, book-length work of autobiography, describing his ancestors and early childhood before arriving at boarding school in the South Downs and the Oxford University experiences that inspired his best-known work, Brideshead Revisited (1945). A Little Learning was intended to be the first of three autobiographical volumes, but Waugh died before more than a fragment of its successor, A Little Hope, was completed, making A Little Learning his last book. In this new critical edition, John Howard Wilson and Barbara Cooke lay out the complex literary and cultural inheritance of A Little Learning, and discuss the circumstances of its composition in a rapidly changing world from which Waugh felt increasingly isolated. For the first time, all the surviving fragments of A Little Hope are reproduced in full, and the volume brings together all Waugh''s major radio, TV, and magazine interviews which span his thirty-year career.

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called "Evelyn Waugh''s finest achievement" by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh''s masterpiece — a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder''s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh''s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. "A genuine literary masterpiece." —Time "Heartbreakingly beautiful...The twentieth century''s finest English novel." —Los Angeles Times

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, this "absolutely delightful" novel (New York Times) movingly and comically chronicles the breakdown of a marriage and the disintegration of English society in the years after World War I. After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. In a novel that combines tragedy, comedy, and savage irony, Evelyn Waugh indelibly captures the irresponsible mood of the "crazy and sterile generation" between the wars.

"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything [Waugh] has ever done," satirizing 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide ( New Yorker). Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets'' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday—and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer''s art. Waugh''s dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal. "Fiendishly entertaining."— New York Times "As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation." — The New Republic "Mr. Waugh''s treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny . . . as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat''s paw on a mouse." ―Alice S. Morris, New York Times Book Review

"An eminently readable comedy of modern war" from the acclaimed English satirist follows the travails of a British aristocrat-turned-soldier during WWII ( New York Times ). Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first novel in Evelyn Waugh''s brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy. "The finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II" — Atlantic Monthly "To Waugh—and to the reader, after Waugh has waved his magic wand of characterization—mediocrity seems not only a human condition but a fascinating one." — TIME

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh''s bestselling comedy of England''s newspaper business of the 1930s is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible -- they swear by it. But few readers are acquainted with Waugh''s memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. Waugh in Abyssinia is an entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter that "provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini''s imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh''s famous satire." In the forward, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores in how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which real-life events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh''s overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man (a misfit), in the right place (a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination), at the right time (when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get.) The result, Waugh in Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other.

Evelyn Waugh presented his biography of St. Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan poet, scholar and gentleman who became the haunted, trapped and murdered priest as a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness.But it is written with a novelist's eye for the telling incident and with all the elegance and feeling of a master of English prose. From the years of success as an Oxford scholar, to entry into the newly founded Society of Jesus and a professorship in Prague, Campion's life was an inexorable progress towards the doomed mission to England. There followed pursuit, betrayal, a spirited defense of loyalty to the Queen, and a horrifying martyr's death at Tyburn.

From sleepy rural England to decadent London and the jungles of Brazil, Waugh describes the fortunes of Lady Brenda Last and her husband Tony, as her infatuation with the young man-about-town John Beaver leads to the break-up of her marriage.

Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century''s wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy.

El retorno de Charles Ryder a Brideshead —la elegante mansión de lord Marchmain, convertida ahora en cuartel— devuelve a su memoria aquellos tiempos, anteriores a la guerra, en que paseaba embelesado por sus hermosos jardines y salones y se dejaba sucumbir al hechizo de sus singulares habitantes. En realidad, nunca pudo Charles librarse de su ambigua amistad con el inquieto Sebastian, ni de su obsesivo amor por la hermana de éste, lady Julia, ni de la oscura y contradictoria fatalidad que dejó marcada para siempre la atribulada vida de los Marchmain con su huella de drama y desvarío. Retorno a Brideshead , una de las novelas más importantes de la aclamada obra del célebre escritor inglés, fue motivo de una espléndida serie televisiva, interpretada entre otros, por Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom y Stépahne Audran, que obtuvo un enorme éxito mundial.

This is the third volume in the 'Sword of Honor' trilogy. The other volumes in this trilogy include: 'Men at Arms' and 'Officers and Gentlemen'.

"Evelyn Waugh kept a diary almost continuously from the age of seven until a year before his death in 1966. Extracts from the diaries caused sensation when they were published by the ''Observer''. They are a unique literary document of 300,000 words which provide the background to the novels which made Waugh famous, and gives a continuously sharp and baleful view of the social history of our times. The Diaries throw new light not only on Waugh''s work, but on the character of a puzzling, cantankerous and formidable man." --Publisher description.

The life of the Empress Helena coincided with the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. Helena made the historic pilgrimage to Palestine, found pieces of wood from the true cross, and built churches at Bethlehem and Olivet.