Most Popular Books by Philip Larkin

Larkin''s final collection of poems shows, as does all his best work, his ability to adapt contemporary speech rhythms and everyday vocabulary to subtle metrical patterns and poetic forms. Many of the poems in the collection, which includes some of his best-known pieces (''The Old Fools'', ''This Be the Verse'', ''The Explosion'', and the title poem) show the preoccupation with death and transience that is so typical of the poet. This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles celebrating Faber''s publishing over the decades.

The North Ship, Philip Larkin''s earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences which shaped its contents.

A stunning new edition that brings together all of Larkin''s poems in addition to some unpublished pieces.

A young man from Northern England struggles to find a sense of belonging at Oxford University during WWII in this "brilliant" novel by a literary icon ( The Times). John, who''s never traveled far from his northern town of Huddleston, finds himself an undergraduate at Oxford University in 1940. A shy, insecure working-class young man, he is awed by his confident, careless roommate and yearns to fit in, clumsily pursuing a girl from a wealthy family. But as his efforts fail, he retreats further into a dream world in this early novel by Philip Larkin, who would go on to become one of the most celebrated poetic voices of postwar Britain. "Provides a revealing portrait of Oxford and the English class system as it existed during World War II . . . Mr. Larkin''s gift for using landscape as a mirror of an individual''s emotions is very much in evidence." — The New York Times Includes an introduction by the author

Seven hundred of the great poet''s letters are collected here offering a moving, instructive portrait of Larken, from his early correspondence with school friends to his last year of life, 1985, when he died at the age of sixty-three.

The appearance of Philip Larkin''s second prose collection - reviews and critical assessments of writers and writing; pieces on jazz, mostly uncollected; some long, revealing and often highly entertaining interviews given on various occasions - was a considerable literary event. Stamped by wit, originality and intelligence, it was vintage Larkin throughout: ''Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.'' ''I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than as an affair of company diversified by solitude.'' Q. ''How did you arrive upon the image of a toad for work or labour?'' A. ''Sheer genius.''

A writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader.

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkin''s writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a ''conservative anarchist'' and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkin''s life; to his timid depressive mother Eva, who by contrast, lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as ''Young Creature'' and ''Old Creature'', with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood. This important edition, meticulously edited by Larkin''s biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

This classic novel captures twelve transformative hours in the life of an exiled woman living in England and working at a library during World War II. Philip Larkin''s second novel was first published in 1947. This story of Katherine Lind and Robin Fennel, of winter and summer, of war and peace, of exile and holidays, is memorable for its compassionate precision and for the uncommon and unmistakable distinction of its writing. Praise for A Girl in Winter "A highly sensitive, rather meditative and slowly moving novel, a work of deliberately modest proportions reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and the early Elizabeth Bowen. . . . Larkin has the ability to evoke, in a few bleak images, a sense of waste and disillusion and emptiness that is as profound as the similarly barren vision of Beckett." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic " A Girl in Winter is a beautifully constructed, funny and profoundly sad book." —Andrew Motion

Collects a wide range of writing by this witty and astute British poet, including commentary on a diverse list of authors

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet''s death in 1985. This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones''s death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin''s life and the convolutions of their relationship.

Drawing on the papers deposited after his death in the Brynmore Jones Library, Hull, this volume collects together virtually all of Philip Larkin''s remaining unpublished fiction.

Philip Larkin (1922-85) was not only one of the foremost English poets of the twentieth century, but also a notable novelist and a distinguished writer on jazz. He was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971. Jazz Writings brings together Larkin''s reviews, articles and essays written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman, and numerous other publications.

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin''s four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis. ''Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there''s another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable.'' - Martin Amis

One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. "Collected Poems" brings together not only all his books--"The North Ship," "The Less Deceived," "The Whitsun Weddings," and "High Windows-"-but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984. This new edition reflects Larkin''s own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new "Collected Poems" is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.