Books by Mary Butts
The Classical Novels: The Macedonian, Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (Recovered classics)
by Mary Butts
Alexander the Great and Queen Cleopatra stand shrouded in myth and mystery at opposite ends of a Greek epoch, symbols of the Hellenizing conquests of Egypt and Persia, the ascendancy of Alexandria, and the final absorption of Ptolemaic Egypt into the Roman Empire. Many authors have exploited their lives as the very stuff of legend, beyond human dimension. By contrast, and with penetrating insight, Mary Butts brings Alexander and Cleopatra alive as human beings in two vivid novels, shattering their conventional masks to explore motivations of power, the allure of “the sacred,” and the clashes of cultures. In dramatic vignettes from various angles, the lives of Alexander and Cleopatra are separately presented with their extraordinary entourages, including Aristotle, Callisthenes, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cicero. Combined for the first time in this volume, The Macedonian and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra form a unified work, richly imagined, thoroughly researched, and augmented by three classical stories not previously collected.
Copies
No copies available.
The Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts
From the internationally acclaimed Australian writer: a single volume gathering a brilliant new collection of his short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.
In the heretofore unpublished Every Move You Make: bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy--here are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent, from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland to bohemian Sydney to Ayres Rock in the Great Victoria Desert. These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.
Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.
Copies
No copies available.
The Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts
Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, 85 in all, are an epiphany, among the important books of this―or any―year
The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives―and ours.
From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.
Copies
No copies available.
The Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts
For the first time in a single volume, all three of Mary Butts's (1890-1937) story collections have been gathered, and seven uncollected stories have been added (including two pieces never before published). Preface by John Ashbery. Foreword by Bruce R. McPherson.
Copies
No copies available.
The Collected Essays of Mary Butts
by Mary Butts
The Collected Essays is the latest addition to an ongoing project to bring almost all of Mary Butts's writings into print, and follows the well-received release of The Complete Stories in 2014.
The eleven essays and 117 literary reviews gathered in this new book were mostly written by Butts between 1932 and 1937, the most productive period of her foreshortened literary career. The range, variety, and depth of subjects is little short of remarkable, ranging from classical history and literature to popular fiction (historical, mystery, ghost stories), from modern history (French and English) to Eastern religion, and from the American Depression to gardening. She wrote first for The Bookman, essentially a trade journal, but soon was engaged to write reviews and essays for prominent journals and newspapers ― The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The London Mercury, Time and Tide, Week-End Review, John O’London Weekly, The Adelphi, Everyman, and even Crime. Moreover, “reviews” is a misnomer for most of Butts’s shorter pieces, since her approach is conversational and opinionated, and sprinkled with interesting asides. Following her death a eulogistic note in Time and Tide read: “[though] her natural abundance sometimes made her a misleading guide to other people’s intentions, the depth of her knowledge and the essential truth of her vision gave a special value to her judgments even when she appeared to be going off at an unlikely tangent. She touched nothing that she did not in some way enrich.”
Copies
No copies available.
The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner (Recovered Classic Series)
by Mary Butts
These two novels, Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Tavernerout of print since originally published in 1928 and 1932form what is almost certainly her masterpiece, a mythic yet contemporary tale of struggle against spiritual alienation.
On the remote southwestern coast along the English Channel, a group of young bohemians have gathered, in retreat from the psychological cataclysm of World War and in search of a moral value on which to base their lives. Armed with Madness begins by invoking an ancient enchantment, a numinous vision of coincident reality, where love can also lead to insanity. Scylla Taverner, her brother Felix, her soon-to-be lover Picus, and their closely knit circle of English, Russian and American friends, retrieve an ancient chalice, which may be the Sanc-Grail. Together they enter upon a psychological and sexual exploration fraught with exhilarating possibility and violent consequence.
Five years later, in Death of Felicity Taverner the quest is renewed, this time to discover a buried truth. Was Felicitys death accidental? A suicide? Or a murder? As the mystery unravels, Felicitys opportunistic widower unveils a plan with a vacation-home development, inciting a drama played out between conscience and evil.
Copies
No copies available.