New Releases by Robertson Davies

A collection of speeches on literature, academia, and more by the “extremely entertaining novelist and public speaker” (The Washington Post). These public addresses by the acclaimed Canadian man of letters and New York Times-bestselling author Robertson Davies provides portraits of literary personalities, advice on writers and writing, and comments on academia and the modern world. Whether giving advice to schoolgirls, discussing the Age of Aquarius as seen by alchemists, exploring Jungian psychology in the theater and insanity in literature, or telling us how to design a haunted house, Davies brings to all his subjects the same intensity and marvelous craftsmanship that are the hallmarks of his fictional creations.

The acclaimed playwright, novelist, and author of Fifth Business explores the performing arts in this witty and insightful essay collection. Though best known for his award-winning fiction, Robertson Davies enjoyed a long and varied career as an actor, playwright, journalist and critic. Happy Alchemy collects an equally diverse range of Davies’ writings—including speeches, articles, prologues to plays, a ghost story set to music, and even a scenario for a film. In this eclectic volume, Davies shares his many musings on music, theatre, opera, and more. These pieces, many of them published here for the first time, touch on topics from Greek tragedy to Scottish Folklore and from Lewis Carroll to Carl Jung.

In this perceptive and entertaining memoir of a doctor’s life, we encounter at least one miraculous cure, a bad breath contest of Olympian standards, tales of cannibals and Tsarist bordellos, medical solutions to literary mysteries—and startling insights into the secrets of a doctor’s consulting room.

Versatile and prolific, Robertson Davies was an actor, journalist and newspaper publisher, playwright, essayist, founding master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, and one of Canada’s greatest novelists. He was also an obsessive, complex, and self-revealing diarist. His diaries, which he began as a teenager, grew to over 3 million words and are an astonishing literary legacy. This first published selection of his diaries spans 1959 to 1963, years in which Davies, in mid-life, experienced both daunting failure and unexpected success. Born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, he was educated at local schools, then Upper Canada College, Queen’s University and Oxford University. He worked in England at the famous Old Vic theatre as an actor and literary advisor before returning to Canada where he became the editor and publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, established himself as a prominent Canadian playwright, and published his first three novels now known as the Salterton Trilogy. By 1959, at the age of forty-five, Robertson Davies was already one of Canada’s leading literary figures. Even so the diaries show that he was frustrated by the limitations of his literary success, often exasperated with the distractions of his daily life and buffeted by his mental and emotional state. They also show that he enjoyed life, was deeply interested in the society he lived in, and in the people he encountered. More often than not he found comedy in the world around him and delighted in recording it. He kept not only a daily journal, but also more focused diaries such as his accounts of the Toronto and New York production of his play Love and Libel, when he worked closely with the great British director Tyrone Guthrie, and of the founding of Massey College, the brainchild of Vincent Massey. The descriptions of backstage and academic politics are invariably entertaining, but in his diaries Davies also reveals himself as intensely self-critical, frequently insecure, and with a highly changeable nature that he described as his “celtic temperament.” We also see him as a partner in an intensely happy and creative marriage, and as a man with an astonishing capacity for hard work. By the end of 1963 his life had taken a new direction. As master of Massey College, he finds himself a public figure, but he is increasingly preoccupied with a new novel he wants to write which he is calling Fifth Business. The publication of A Celtic Temperament establishes Robertson Davies as one of the great diarists. In their range, variety, intimacy, and honesty his diaries present an extraordinarily rich portrait of the man and his times.

Fifth Business, which one critic said was "as masterfully executed as anything in the history of the novel," might be described simply as the life of a schoolteacher named Dunstan Ramsay. But such description would not even suggest the dark currents of love, ambition, vengeance, and death that flow through this powerful work, cast in the form of Ramsay''s memoirs. Fifth Business is the first novel in the celebrated Deptford Trilogy, which also includes The Manticore and World of Wonders--it also stands alone as the story of a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

Robertson Davies wrote in most forms: plays, novels, diaries, articles, book reviews, play reviews, editorials, children’s and adult short stories (including ghost stories), television plays, libretti, an oratorio, poems, and speeches. The greater part of this collection is speeches, made throughout his life; also included are three articles and a poem.

The Foundation, looking for a worthy undertaking upon which to expend its considerable monies, decides to fund the doctoral work of Hulda Schnakenburg, an extraordinarily talented music student. Her task is to complete the score of an unfinished opera.

Robertson Davies gave many speeches over the years, and one of his favourite topics at these events was reading. The greater part of this collection is speeches, made throughout his life; also included are essays, ghost stories, and a children''s short story.

The second book in Robertson Davies''s acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. The Manticore—the second book in the series after Fifth Business—follows David Staunton, a man pleased with his success but haunted by his relationship with his larger-than-life father. As he seeks help through therapy, he encounters a wonderful cast of characters who help connect him to his past and the death of his father. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The first book in Robertson Davies''s acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man''s land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Dr. Jonathan Hullah is a "cunning man," one who will help almost all infirmities of mind and body, and enjoys a reputation as a brilliant, if unorthodox, diagnostician. Earlier in his career, Hullah was present at the death of Father Hobbes, who died while celebrating Communion. Prompted by a journalist''s questions about this mysterious death, Hullah begins to reflect on his past and the other mysteries he has encountered, medical and spiritual.

Robertson Davies brought a great sense of style to everything he wrote. Whether it was a letter to his daughter ("Love from us both, Daddy") or a formal letter to the editor disembowelling a hostile reviewer that concludes humbly ("I am content to remain, Yours, writhing in deserved ignominy..."), he wrote with care, with zest, and in a clearly distinctive voice. Since these letters written by Davies have been selected from the years when he was at the height of his fame, the recipients range widely, from Sir John Gielgud to Margaret Atwood, and from Greg Gatenby ("You are a merciless man and God will punish you in the next world") to his publishers abroad. Naturally, like all the best letters, they contain fascinating gossip: ..."and Salvador Dali, at the next table, raised his eyebrows and popped his eyes to such a degree that I feared they might leave their moorings and bounce about the floor." The title of the book comes from a confidential letter to Jack McClelland and hints at the secrets to be learned from these letters. This "over the shoulder" look at his private correspondence shows us Davies in a variety of roles: as an old friend consoling Horace Davenport on the loss of his son; as a university administrator bewailing the miseries of fundraising; as a keen theatre-goer writing a letter of congratulations to an actor after a fine performance; as a professional writer advocating fair rates for authors to a cabinet minister; as a husband constructing a handwritten circular card to convey loving birthday greetings to his wife; as a bearer of health-giving good cheer to an ailing friend; and as a novelist struggling with his new books, and admitting to his doubts aboutthem. The letters are frequently testy, tart, and not always "politically correct." Among those who felt his sting are Judith Skelton Grant, his biographer, and Douglas Gibson, his publisher, but other, more deserving, targets are suitably chastised. And whether they are funny, moving, or thought-provoking, these private letters provide a new look at the private Davies, revealed in his own vigorous words.

, defrocked monks, mad professors, and wealthy eccentrics-a remarkable cast peoples Robertson Davies'' brilliant spectacle of theft, perjury, murder, scholarship, and love at a modern university. Only Mr. Davies, author of Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, could have woven together their destinies with such wit, humour-and wisdom.

Dans ce dernier roman publi ̌avant sa mort, le grand romancier canadien-anglais donne la parole ̉un mďecin, Jonathan Hullah, qui ̉partir d''un fait divers, la mort du pr̈e Hobbes au beau milieu d''une cľb̌ration liturgique, v̌oque le monde de son enfance, les amitiš qui s''y sont tissěs et leur aboutissement dans un Toronto en pleine mutation. Un roman haut en couleur, empli de ces personnages excentriques auxquels nous a habituš Davies, empreint de sagesse et de malice, qui use et abuse sans pudeur des pouvoirs de la fiction pour le plus grand plaisir du lecteur. [SDM].

Qui se cache derrière la fondation Cornish ? Une secte d''adorateurs du Graal ? Ou, tout simplement, un groupe de mécènes fidèles à l''esprit de leur bienfaiteur ? Mystères. Une chose est sûre : lorsqu''ils décident de monter un opéra d''Hoffmann, dont le livret inachevé vient d''être retrouvé, ils ignorent que cette initiative va provoquer une réaction en chaîne incontrôlable. Ainsi s''achève la " trilogie de Cornish ", fresque littéraire dont chaque volet est indépendant des autres, mais dont l''ensemble forme une saga unique en son genre.

An Ottawa civil servants royal connection and a letter to the editor are the themes from two of Davies best plays.

Two plays from the 1940s by the most important Canadian playwright of the postwar period.

This humorous novel explores the reactions of a small town to a false engagement notice in the local paper.

Anthony Burgess listed Davies'' The Rebel Angels among the 99 best novels of our time and declared that Davies himself is "without doubt Nobel Prize material". In this unusual novel, Davies'' protagonist is murdered in the first sentence of the book, but he lingers as a ghost to view the exploits of his ancestors, from the American Revolution to the present.

Woven around the pursuits of the energetic spirits and erudite scholars of the University of St. John and the Holy Ghost, this dazzling trilogy of novels lures the reader into a world of mysticism, historical allusion, and gothic fantasy that could only be the invention of Canada''s grand man of letters.

Murdered by his wife''s lover, Gil must spend his afterlife seated next to his murderer at a film festival, where he views the exploits of his ancestors from the Revolutionary era to his parents'' time

Witty collection of some of the best of [Davies] newspaper and magazine articles.

Conversations with Robertson Davies is a long overdue anthology of interviews with Canada''s most respected literary figure. Journalist, essayist, reviewer, playwright, and novelist, Robertson Davies has not only been a leading figure in Canadian literature since World War II, but, since the publication of Fifth Business in 1970, he has become known throughout the world. Conversations with Robertson Davies will be of interest both to the student of Canadian literature and culture and to the scholar examining Davies''s plays and novels as well as to the general reader who would like to know more about the awesome man behind the Salterton and Deptford trilogies, What''s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. A majority of this anthology of twenty-eight interviews has never before appeared in print. Along with these previously unpublished interviews, the reader finds a selection of the best print interviews: Tom Harpur of the Toronto Star proves Davies''s spiritual beliefs, Ann Saddlemyer looks into his dreams, and author Terence M. Green questions Davies on the supernatural.

Now in paperback, the book that marked the first appearance in the United States of Robertson Davies''s mischievous alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks.