New Releases by Evelyn Waugh

"A wickedly witty and iridescent novel" satirizes the generation of "Bright Young Things"—rich young people who dominated London high society in the 1920s ( Time ). Roaring Twenties London was the place to be—at least for the wealthy and well-connected of Great Britain. With the gossip columns recording everything from their parties to their scandals, writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and his glamorous, aristocratic fiancée Nina Blount, along with an assortment of eccentric characters, explore the capricious excesses and forbidden pleasures of a life lived before the public eye—where innocence mixes with sophistication and yields shocking results. From Evelyn Waugh, "one of the most exhilarating stylists" of the twentieth century ( Newsweek), Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of society. "Vile Bodies may shock you, but it will make you laugh." — The New York Times

Brideshead Revisited harkens back to the perceived 'golden age' prior to World War II. In these halcyon days, Charles Ryder is infatuated with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper’s Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courtney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there. Lord Copper believes it “a very promising little war” and proposes “to give it fullest publicity”. Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic “scoop” of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.

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.

In "Put Out More Flags," Evelyn Waugh presents a satirical examination of British society on the brink of World War II, delving into themes of disillusionment, moral decay, and the absurdities of war. The novel unfolds with Waugh's signature wit and sharp prose, characterized by a blend of irony and dark humor that critiques the complacency of the upper classes. Set against the backdrop of impending conflict, Waugh sketches a vivid tableau of characters whose superficial pursuits masquerade as patriotism while revealing the true hollowness of their values. The text exemplifies Waugh's early exploration of the tensions between artifice and authenticity, contributing significantly to the literary tradition of social satire. Evelyn Waugh, a prominent figure in 20th-century literature, was profoundly shaped by his experiences during the interwar period and his disillusionment with contemporary British culture. His keen observations of elite society stem from his own background and experiences, including his time at Oxford and his journey as a correspondent during the Second World War. "Put Out More Flags," written in 1942, reflects his personal responses to the chaotic world around him, illustrating his belief in the necessity of artistic integrity amidst societal turmoil. This novel is essential for readers seeking a vivid portrayal of the British psyche during a time of upheaval. Waugh's masterful storytelling and satirical lens make it an enduring critique of the era and a compelling read for those interested in the intricate interplay between society and the looming specter of war. Whether you are a scholar of modern literature or a casual reader, "Put Out More Flags" offers a thought-provoking journey into the complexities of human nature and cultural identity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

In "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold," Evelyn Waugh crafts a darkly comedic narrative that navigates the tumultuous psyche of its protagonist, an author grappling with the disquieting weight of his own imagination. Set against the backdrop of post-World War II Britain, Waugh employs an incisive literary style that melds realism and absurdity, echoing the existential crises of his time. The novel deftly explores themes of mental instability, societal alienation, and the artistic process, inviting readers into the labyrinthine thoughts of Pinfold as he confronts both external and internal demons during a tumultuous sea voyage. Evelyn Waugh, an eminent figure in 20th-century literature, drew upon his own experiences with mental health struggles and the nuances of literary fame. Known for his sharp wit and acerbic social commentary, Waugh's work often grappled with the tensions between personal identity and public persona, making Pinfold's journey a semi-autobiographical reflection of the author's own endeavors and anxieties. This novel is a must-read for those intrigued by the complexities of the human mind and the often chaotic interplay between reality and fiction. Waugh's exploration of Pinfold's plight resonates with anyone who has faced the daunting challenges of self-perception and the expectations of society, making it an enduring and compelling literary work. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

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

The three novels of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy of war novels, called "the finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II" (The Atlantic), collected in one volume. This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war overwhelming. Though often somber, Sword of Honor is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric. Sword of Honor comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender.

Evelyn Waugh's personal favorite of his novels and "a superlatively well done book" set in the age of Emperor Constantine ( Chicago Tribune). Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftain who is thrown into marriage with the man who will one day become the Roman emperor Constantius. Leaving home for lands unknown, she spends her adulthood seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining ancient world, and becomes initiated into Christianity just as it is recognized as the religion of the Roman Empire. Helena—a novel that Evelyn Waugh considered to be his favorite, and most ambitious, work—deftly traverses the forces of corruption, treachery, enlightenment, and political intrigue of Imperial Rome as it brings to life an inspiring heroine. "In Helena, the play of words and the fireworks, the exquisite descriptions of landscapes, and even the finished portraits of the heroine, her husband, and her son, are always subordinate to the author's broad vision of the mixed anguish and hope with which the world of Constantine's time was filled." — New York Herald Tribune

A "lavishly entertaining" ( Publishers Weekly) distillation of Waugh's genius--abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form. Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure" to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.

In 1581 Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest working underground in Protestant England, was found guilty of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Years later he would be beatified. Evelyn Waugh's compelling and elegant narrative is a homage to the man he revered as a poet, scholar, hero and martyr. He tells Campion's story with a novelist's eye for detail, from his success as an Oxford scholar, through his travels around Europe, his doomed secret mission to England and on to his capture and dramatic trial. Vividly re-creating a time of persecution and surveillance, Evelyn Waugh - author of A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Vile Bodies, Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy - writes that 'the hunted, trapped murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion's voice sounds to us across the centuries'.

"In John Carmel Cardinal Heenan, Waugh found a sympathetic pastor and somewhat of a kindred spirit. This volume brings together the personal correspondence between Waugh and Heenan during the 1960s." - publishers description.

One of Evelyn Waugh's most exuberant comedies, Scoop is a brilliantly irreverent satire of Fleet Street and its hectic pursuit of hot news. Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs Algernon Stitch, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. But for, pale, ineffectual William Boot, editor of the Daily Beast's 'nature notes' column, being mistaken for a competent journalist may prove to be a fatal error... If you enjoyed Scoop, you might like Waugh's Decline and Fall, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch' Christopher Hitchens

A "lavishly entertaining" ( Publishers Weekly ) short fiction collection from the man Time hailed "one of the century's great masters of English prose." "Wonderful to behold. . . . Waugh is here in all his glory." —Susan Minot, Bookforum Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure" to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost. The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius—abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form. "A necessary purchase, and you should be able to claim it against tax as an aid to professional sanity. . . . You emerge braced and bolstered, as if by a cold shower and a cocktail. . . . That Waugh enriched us with the unalloyed gleam of his prose—far purer than any of his leaden imitators manage—is now beyond debate." —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker "The man was incapable of writing a bad sentence." —J. Bottum, Washington Times

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) was born in Hampstead, second son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. In 1928 he published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). In 1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia. In 1942 he published Put Out More Flags and then in 1945 Brideshead Revisited. Men at Arms (1952) was the first volume of 'The Sword of Honour' trilogy, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; the other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, followed in 1955 and 1961. If you enjoyed Brideshead Revisited, you might like Waugh's Vile Bodies, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Lush and evocative ... Expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit' The Times

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade - whether promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires. If you enjoyed Vile Bodies, you might like Waugh's A Handful of Dust, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The high point of the experimental, original Waugh' Malcolm Bradbury, Sunday Times 'This brilliantly funny, anxious and resonant novel ... the difficult edgy guide to the turn of the decade' Richard Jacobs 'It's Britain's Great Gatsby' Stephen Fry, director of Vile Bodies film adaptation Bright Young Things

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.

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, matched wits and exchanged insults in more than five hundred letters, a continuous irreverent dialogue that stretched for twenty-two years. Their delicious correspondence, much of it never published before (for fear of speaking ill of the living), provides colorful glimpses of both lives, testifies to their enduring but thorny friendship, and evokes the literary and social circles of London and Paris at midcentury. In their letters they sharpened their wits at the expense of friends and enemies alike, but with particular relish they dissected their friends, who included Harold Acton, Graham Greene, the Sitwells, Duff and Diana Cooper, Randolph Churchill, and their favorite butt, Cyril Connolly. Waugh's pessimistic brand of Roman Catholicism clashed with Mitford's cheerful iconoclasms; her francophilia only fueled her friend's dislike of all things French. He accused her of bad grammar and worse theology; she nailed him with snobbery and anti-Semitism.

"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.

Third of World War II trilogy. M̀en of arms' 30 LP I/S; Òfficers and gentlemen' 15 I/S; Ùnconditonal surrender' 1 I/S. Rev ed. incorporating all these works as a whole under title S̀word of honour' 8 I/S.