EBOOK
About
Whether following the obsessions of Henry James, marveling at the "indispensible" Beatrix Potter, or exploring the Manichean world of Oliver Twist, Graham Greene revisits the books and authors of his lifetime. Here is Greene on Fielding, Doyle, Kipling, and Conrad; on The Prisoner of Zenda and the "revolutionary . . . colossal egoism" of Laurence Stern's epic comic novel, Tristram Shandy; on the adventures of both Allan Quatermain and Moll Flanders; and more. Greene strolls among the musty oddities and folios sold on the cheap at an outdoor book mart, tells of a bizarre literary hoax perpetrated on a hapless printseller in eighteenth-century Pall Mall, and in the titular essay, reveals the book that unlocked his imagination so thoroughly that he decided to write forever. For Greene, "all the other possible futures slid away."
Related Subjects
Reviews
"The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling."
V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London)
"In a class by himself. . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
William Golding
"A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy."
The New York Times