Most Popular Books by John Fowles

Perhaps the most beloved of John Fowles''s internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant''s Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" ( New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic.

"A masterpiece of symbolically charged realism . . . [by] the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James." —John Gardner, Saturday Review The eponymous hero of John Fowles''s largest and richest novel is an English playwright turned Hollywood screenwriter who has begun to question his own values. Summoned home to England to visit an ailing friend, Daniel Martin finds himself back in the company of people who once knew him well, forced to confront his buried past, and propelled toward a journey of self-discovery through which he ultimately creates for himself a more satisfying existence. A brilliantly imagined novel infused with a profound understanding of human nature, Daniel Martin is John Fowles at the height of his literary powers. "We''re never unaware that Mr. Fowles is up to something that is extremely important to him, and this alone is a source of considerable tension and excitement . . . an old-fashioned novel in the sense that one can enter and live in it." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Absorbing, intellectually challenging . . . A startlingly provocative novel . . . Like Henry James before him, Fowles has created rarified creatures free enough to take on the toughest question that life offers: How to live?"—Paul Gray, Time

"A superb novel...Evil has seldom been so sinister." --Time Hailed as the first modern psychological thriller, The Collector is the internationally bestselling novel that catapulted John Fowles into the front rank of contemporary novelists. This tale of obsessive love--the story of a lonely clerk who collects butterflies and of the beautiful young art student who is his ultimate quarry--remains unparalleled in its power to startle and mesmerize. "A bravura first novel...As a horror story, this book is a remarkable tour de force." --New Yorker

In 1963, John Fowles won international recognition with The Collector, his first published novel. In the years following—with the publication of The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, and his other critically acclaimed works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—Fowles took his place among the most innovative and important English novelists of our time. Now, with this first volume of his journals, which covers the years from 1949 to 1965, we see revealed not only the creative development of a great writer but also the deep connection between Fowles’s autobiographical experience and his literary inspiration. Commencing in Fowles’s final year at Oxford, the journals in this volume chronicle the years he spent as a university lecturer in France; his experiences teaching school on the Greek island of Spetsai (which would inspire The Magus) and his love affair there with the married woman who would later become his first wife; and his return to England and his ongoing struggle to achieve literary success. It is an account of a life lived in total engagement with the world; although Fowles the novelist takes center stage, we see as well Fowles the nascent poet and critic, ornithologist and gardener, passionate naturalist and traveler, cinephile and collector of old books. Soon after he fell in love with his first wife, Elizabeth, Fowles wrote in his journal, “She has asked me not to write about her in here. But I could not not write, loving her as I do. . . . What else I betrayed, I could not betray this diary.” It is that determined, unsparing honesty and forthrightness that imbues these journals with all the emotional power and narrative complexity of his novels. They are a revelation of both the man and the artist.

In the spring of 1736 four men and one woman, all traveling under assumed names, are crossing the Devonshire countryside en route to a mysterious rendezvous. Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

The Magus was originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later. The story of Nicholas Urfe and his friendship with a demonic millionaire which leads to an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps, The Magus endures as the most enigmatic and magical novel in the Fowles canon, a work rich in symbols, conundrums, and labyrinthine twists of events. This Modern Library edition includes a new introduction by the author.

An amnesiac novelist converses with his muse in this "clever and wickedly funny" classic novel by the author of The Collector ( Atlantic Monthly ). "A literary delight." — Playboy Literature, love, and lust collide as a writer meets his muse—and his match—in John Fowles''s most slyly dazzling work of fiction. The writer: Miles Green, a novelist, who awakens in a hospital room, suffering from amnesia. The muse: Erato, who appears alternately as a doctor, a punk, a geisha, a nymph; by turns tender, critical, admiring, and bossy; engaging Miles in a wickedly entertaining and teasingly enigmatic dialogue of words and flesh. "A jeu d''esprit with a vengeance. . . . Sex and art stare each other down and the contest is a standoff. . . . Fowles raises tantalizing and entertaining questions." — Time "Splendid. . . . It is the best possible evidence of the relationship between John Fowles and his own muse that he can spin a web like this which is so light, and yet so strong." — Washington Post Book World Originally published in 1982.

Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos. The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, ''of a person or thing, the best or most excellent its kind'',''What I was really trying to define was an ideal of human freedom (the Aristos) in an unfree world,'' wrote Fowles in 1965. He called a materialistic and over-conforming culture to reckoning with his views on a myriad of subjects -pleasure and pain, beauty and u liness, Christianit ,humanism, existentialism, socialism.

"Wormholes" presents, for the first time, a representative gathering of Fowles''s fugitive and intensely personal nonfiction writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings.

The Ebony Tower, comprising a novella, three stories, and a translation of a medieval French tale, echoes themes from John Fowles''s internationally celebrated novels as it probes the fitful relations between love and hate, pleasure and pain, fantasy and reality.

The classic meditation on creativity and the natural world “For years I have carried this book. . . with me on travels to reread, ponder, envy. In prose of classic gravity, precision, and delicacy, Fowles addresses matters of final importance.” —W. S. Merwin, Los Angeles Times Book Review “The Tree is the fullest and finest exploration I’ve ever read of how the useless delights to be discovered in nature can ripen into the practice of art.” —Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift First published a generation ago, The Tree is renowned English novelist John Fowles''s provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and a powerful argument against taming the wild. In it, Fowles recounts his own childhood in England and describes how he rebelled against his Edwardian father’s obsession with the “quantifiable yield” of well-pruned fruit trees and came to prize instead the messy, purposeless beauty of nature left to its wildest. The Tree is an inspiring, even life-changing book, one that reaffirms our connection to nature and reminds us of the pleasure of getting lost, the merits of having no plan, and the wisdom of following one’s nose wherever it may lead—in life as much as in art. This special 30th anniversary edition includes an introduction by Barry Lopez.

Mars 1867, Sarah Woodruff, abandonnée par son amant - un lieutenant français - vit plus ou moins repliée sur elle-même, ignorée d''une petite communauté puritaine qui la considère un peu folle. Ce n''est pas l''avis de Charles Smithson, seul homme à oser un jour s''approcher d''elle, et dont la vie est peu à peu bouleversée par cette rencontre. Sarah et le Lieutenant français n''est pas seulement un grand roman d''amour, c''est aussi l''histoire d''une femme en quête de son émancipation et une féroce peinture de mœurs. Avec, pour toile de fond, la cité portuaire de Lyme Regis et les falaises du Dorset, dans cette Angleterre victorienne où, comme le dit John Fowles, " les gens momifiaient leurs sentiments dans d''étranges bandelettes ".

A book of exquisite photographs in which four generations of one remarkable Cornish family record poignant moments of maritime disaster along the most treacherous coast in the world.

In her haste to flee the place before the fairy godmother''s magic loses effect, Cinderella leaves behind a glass slipper.

This firsthand account of the years before Fowles achieved recognition reads with all the emotional power and narrative complexity of his novels, providing invaluable insight into the relationship between Fowles'' life and his work.

John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant''s Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century. The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles'' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles'' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life. The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England''s Dorset coast, where discontented with society''s voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life. Great works in their own right, Fowles'' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.

John Fowles wrote poetry throughout his lifetime, but more during the 1950s and 1960s than later. This book presents a selection of his poetic work opening with two sequences dating from the early part of his career, two of which draw on his time living in Greece and his interest in Greek mythology.

Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, befriends a local millionaire; but the friendship soon evolves into a deadly game and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.