Books by Anthony Burgess

Tremor of Intent

by Anthony Burgess

A brilliantly funny spy novel from the author of the ground-breaking A Clockwork Orange. Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treachery, and religion. Anthony Burgess's cast of astonishing characters includes Roper's German prostitute wife; Miss Devi and her Tamil love treatise; and the large Mr. Theodorescu, international secret monger and lascivious gourmand. A rare combination of the deadly serious and the absurd, the lofty and the lusty, Tremor of Intent will hold you in its thrall.

Tremor of Intent

by Anthony Burgess

A brilliantly funny spy novel, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, and treachery. From the author of the ground-breaking A Clockwork Orange.

Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treachery, and religion. Anthony Burgess's cast of astonishing characters includes Roper's German prostitute wife; Miss Devi and her Tamil love treatise; and the large Mr. Theodorescu, international secret monger and lascivious gourmand. A rare combination of the deadly serious and the absurd, the lofty and the lusty, Tremor of Intent will hold you in its thrall.

A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?" This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

A newly revised text for A Clockwork Orange’s 50th anniversary brings the work closest to its author’s intentions. A Clockwork Orange is as brilliant, transgressive, and influential as when it was published fifty years ago. A nightmare vision of the future told in its own fantastically inventive lexicon, it has since become a classic of modern literature and the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s once-banned film, whose recent reissue has brought this revolutionary tale on modern civilization to an even wider audience. Andrew Biswell, PhD, director of the International Burgess Foundation, has taken a close look at the three varying published editions alongside the original typescript to recreate the novel as Anthony Burgess envisioned it. We publish this landmark edition with its original British cover and six of Burgess’s own illustrations. 6 illustrations

A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

One of Esquire's 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
“A brilliant novel.… [A] savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.”―New York Times
In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.” 6 illustrations

A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

Fully restored edition of Anthony Burgess' original text of A Clockwork Orange, with a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis 'It is a horrorshow story ...' Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel's 'sweet and juicy criminality'. Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He spent six years in the British Army before becoming a schoolmaster and colonial education officer in Malaya and Brunei. After the success of his Malayan Trilogy, he became a full-time writer in 1959. His books have been published all over the world, and they include The Complete Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, Napoleon Symphony, Tremor of Intent, Earthly Powers and A Dead Man in Deptford. Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993. Andrew Biswell is the Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. His publications include a biography, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, which won the Portico Prize in 2006. He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.

The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage (Modern Library Classics)

by John Steinbeck, John le Carré, Anthony Burgess, Rebecca West

Here is an extraordinary collection of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by Alan Furst, a contemporary master of the genre. The Book of Spies brings us the aristocratic intrigues of The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which French émigrés duel with Robespierre’s secret service; the savage political realities of the 1930s in Eric Ambler’s classic A Coffin for Dimitrios; the ordinary (well, almost) citizens of John le Carré’s The Russia House, who are drawn into Cold War spy games; and the 1950s Vietnam of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, with its portrait of American idealism and duplicity. Drawing on acknowledged classics and rediscovered treasures, A Book of Spies delivers literate entertainment and excitement on every page.

Re Joyce

by Anthony Burgess

Arguing that "the appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke," Burgess provides a readable, accessible guide to the writings of James Joyce.

Nothing Like the Sun

by Anthony Burgess

"Wildly inventive" ―Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve
A magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare’s love life, following young Will’s maturation into sex and writing. A playful romp, it is at the same time a serious look at the forces that midwife art, the effects of time and place, and the ordinariness that is found side by side with the extraordinariness of genius.

Nothing Like the Sun

by Anthony Burgess

Before Shakespeare in Love, there was Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun: a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life.

Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

In Earthly Powers Burgess created his masterpiece. At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power—Kenneth Toomey, a past-his-prime author of mediocre fiction, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into, bitter, luxurious old age, living in self-exile on Malta; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect.
Through the lives of these two modern men Burgess explores the very essence of power in a narrative that spans from Hollywood, to Dublin, Nairobi, Paris, and beyond.

The Black Prince Adapted from an Original Script by Anthony Burgess

by Anthony Burgess, Adam Roberts

'I'm working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III's time ... The fourteenth century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than hey-nonny nostalgia' - Anthony Burgess, Paris Review, 1973 The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward II, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life by an author in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess's best work.

Beard's Roman Women: By Anthony Burgess (The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess)

by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess draws upon an autobiographical episode to create Beard’s Roman Women, the story of a man haunted by his first wife, presumed dead. But is she? A marvellously economical book, full-flavoured, funny, and heartfelt, showing its author at the height of his powers. This new edition is the first to be published with David Robinson’s photographs for over forty years. The text of the novel has been restored using the original typescripts, and Graham Foster’s new introduction provides valuable insight into the fictional and biographical contexts of the novel. The text is fully annotated with a detailed set of notes and this edition includes the previously unpublished script for Burgess’s television film By the Waters of Leman: Byron and Shelley at Geneva, and a rare piece of Burgess’s writing about Rome.

The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961 - 1993

by Anthony Burgess

"The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manqué: I make no other pretensions …" (Anthony Burgess)

Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man’s Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess’s journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect.

The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable.

Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material.

A Clockwork Orange (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange: Restored Edition (Penguin Modern Classics)

Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements

by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write.
A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed―in liberty, equality, and fraternity―from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

ABBA ABBA: By Anthony Burgess (The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess)

by Anthony Burgess

ABBA ABBA is one of Anthony Burgess’s most original works, combining fiction, poetry and translation. A product of his time in Italy in the early 1970s, this delightfully unconventional book is part historical novel, part poetry collection, as well as a meditation on translation and the generating of literature by one of Britain’s most inventive post-war authors. Set in Papal Rome in the winter of 1820-21, Part One recreates the consumptive John Keats’s final months in the Eternal City and imagines his meeting the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Pitting Anglo-Italian cultures and sensibilities against each other, Burgess creates a context for his highly original versions of 71 sonnets by Belli, which feature in Part Two.

This new edition includes extra material by Burgess, along with an introduction and notes by Paul Howard, Fellow in Italian Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Ernest Hemingway (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

by Anthony Burgess

Ernest Hemingway was 'a man who lived it up to write it down' and his life became the root from which his novels grew. At the age of 18 he was awarded a medal for bravery in the First World War; he honed his literary craft in 1920s Paris; his macho image grew with his love of big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and bull-fighting and was cemented during the Spanish Civil War, when he survived the bombardment of Madrid. But, by the 1940s, the darkness of his alcoholism and violent rages began to weigh heavily. Hemingway had become the patriarch of American literature but he was plagued by unrelenting demons and an insidious disenchantment with life. In this unflinching portrait, Anthony Burgess explores Hemingway’s fatal contradictions: his arrogance and self-doubt, his machismo and vulnerability. He reveals a man who was as much a creation as his books yet who, even at his worst, reminds us that to engage literature one has first to engage life.

Honey for the Bears

by Anthony Burgess

"There are so few genuinely entertaining novels around that we ought to cheer whenever one turns up. Continuous, fizzing energy…Honey for the Bears is a triumph." ―Kingsley Amis, New York Times
A sharply written satire, Honey for the Bears sends an unassuming antiques dealer, Paul Hussey, to Russia to do one final deal on the black market as a favor for a dead friend's wife. Even on the ship's voyage across, the Russian sensibility begins to pervade: lots of secrets and lots of vodka. When his American wife is stricken by a painful rash and he is interrogated at his hotel by Soviet agents who know that he is trying to sell stylish synthetic dresses to the masses starved for fashion, his precarious inner balance is thrown off for good. More drink follows, discoveries of his wife's illicit affair with another woman, and his own submerged sexual feelings come breaking through the surface, bubbling up in Russian champagne and caviar.

A Long Trip to Teatime (Dover Literature for Children)

by Anthony Burgess

"The original illustrations, marvelously expressive black and white drawings by Fulvio Testa, form the ideal complement for Burgess's text." — The Emerald City Book Review
Edmund Ironside, Edward the Confessor, Edward the Elder, Edward the Martyr . . . Edgar wearies of an endless history lecture on England's Anglo-Saxon kings and longs for an escape from the classroom—which he finds with a sudden plunge through a tiny hole in his desk. Now Edgar is on the shores of Easter Island, listening to the chiming of Easter bells, and searching for Edenborough, from whence he must find his way home in time for tea. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Edgar finds himself astray in a wonderland, his bizarre adventures highlighted by gloriously nonsensical conversations with curious creatures.
Anthony Burgess, the acclaimed author of A Clockwork Orange, plays with logic and language in this captivating lost classic. Studded with Joycean puns and fantastical words, the dreamlike odyssey offers a passing nod to the concepts of free will and relativity and can be appreciated by readers of all ages. This edition marks a return to print for A Long Trip to Teatime, which has been unavailable since the late 1970s. Newly republished in the centennial of Burgess's birth, this volume features the charming original illustrations by artist Fulvio Testa.

Puma: By Anthony Burgess (The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess)

by Anthony Burgess

Puma – disentangled from the three-part structure of The End of the World News and published here for the first time in its intended format – is Anthony Burgess’s lost science fiction novel. Set some way into the future, the story details the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy – the dreaded Puma. It is a visceral book about the end of history as man has known it. Despite its apocalyptic theme, its earthquakes and tidal waves, murder and madness, Puma is a gloriously-comic novel, steeped in the rich literary heritage of a world soon to be extinguished and celebrating humanity in all its squalid glory. In Burgess’s hands this meditation on destruction, mitigated by the hope of salvation for a select few, becomes powerful exploration of friendship, violence, literature and science at the end of the world.

The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (The Norton Library)

by Anthony Burgess

A sweetly satiric look at the twilight days of colonialism. Set in postwar Malaya at the time when people and governments alike are bemused and dazzled by the turmoil of independence, this three-part novel is rich in hilarious comedy and razor-sharp in observation. The protagonist of the work is Victor Crabbe, a teacher in a multiracial school in a squalid village, who moves upward in position as he and his wife maintain a steady decadent progress backward.

The Pianoplayers: by Anthony Burgess (The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess)

by Anthony Burgess

This novel is one of Anthony Burgess’s most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life.

The Pianoplayers is a funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers.

Part of the forthcoming Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, this book offers an opportunity to reappraise an unjustly neglected novel important to our understanding of Burgess’s wider oeuvre. The 2017 Burgess centenary makes this a key moment for reflection on the life and work of a major figure in twentieth century letters.