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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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

The final novel of the renowned author's WWII trilogy, following Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen. By 1941, after serving in North Africa and Crete, Guy Crouchback has lost his Halberdier idealism. A desk job in London gives him the chance of reconciliation with his former wife. Then, in Yugoslavia, as a liaison officer with the partisans, Crouch becomes finally and fully aware of the futility of a war he once saw in terms of honor. "The finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II." — Atlantic Monthly

"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

Waugh''s own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy''s Club - is only part of the shambles of Crouchback''s war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity. Sword of Honour combines three volumes- Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender, which were originally published separately. Extensively revised by Waugh, they were published as the one-volume Sword of Honour in 1965, in the form in which Waugh himself wished them to be read.

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.

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

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, Lord Copper feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. So begins "Scoop, "Waugh's exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.

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.