{"title":"Zachary Leader","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the insightful works of Zachary Leader, a distinguished biographer and literary critic. Delve into meticulously researched lives and sharp analyses, perfect for readers seeking depth and understanding.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"life-of-kingsley-amis-book-zachary-leader-9780099428428","title":"The Life of Kingsley Amis","description":"In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist.   Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis's childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover.   He explores Amis's fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis's work. As the editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, hailed in The Sunday Telegraph as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49506453717265,"sku":"GOR004330940","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49590655910161,"sku":"GOR003088068","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099428423.jpg?v=1750908139"},{"product_id":"life-of-kingsley-amis-book-zachary-leader-9780224062275","title":"The Life of Kingsley Amis","description":"In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist. Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis' friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on hundreds of previously unpublished letters, Leader's biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis' childhood, school days, life as a teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. He explores Amis' fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis' work. As the editor of \"The Letters of Kingsley Amis\", hailed in the \"Sunday Telegraph\" as 'one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art', Leader is more than qualified to be his authorised biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49511595639057,"sku":"GOR003716685","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50886937018641,"sku":"GOR004083276","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224062271.jpg?v=1751290588"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-book-zachary-leader-9780099520931","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow","description":"Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times  'Terrific' Guardian 'Enthralling' Spectator 'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph 'Unsurpassable' New York Review of Books  By the time Herzog was published in 1964, Saul Bellow was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, described in later years by the critic James Wood as ‘the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century.’ Zachary Leader’s biography shows how this prose, with its exhilarating mixture of high culture and low, came into existence. It also traces Bellow’s life away from the desk, as polemicist, teacher, husband, father and lover. Fierce in his loyalties, Bellow was no less fierce in his enmities, combative in defence of his freedoms. Spanning the period from Bellow’s birth in 1915 to the publication of Herzog in 1964, volume one of this biography is the first since Saul Bellow’s death, and the first to discuss his life and work in its entirety.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49528286806289,"sku":"GOR008303243","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49587245580561,"sku":"GOR008695587","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50407664877841,"sku":"NGR9780099520931","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52110815953169,"sku":"GOR014473971","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099520931.jpg?v=1751289884"},{"product_id":"letters-of-kingsley-amis-book-zachary-leader-9780006387831","title":"The Letters of Kingsley Amis","description":"`I have not laughed aloud at a book so frequently for a very long time…a major literary event’ David Lodge, Times Literary Supplement             Kingsley Amis was a prolific, brilliant and outrageous correspondent. In letters to friends like Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he could unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than 800 letters included in this volume contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings.             They reveal Amis’s youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his spectacularly successful first novel, Lucky Jim; his love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his second, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country’s most revered, yet uniquely controversial, literary figures. Seldom can any writer have provided such a lively and coruscating self-portrait as is revealed by these letters.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49540834984209,"sku":"GOR001199465","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49610568859921,"sku":"GOR010353975","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49610979541265,"sku":"GOR004829249","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49642668327185,"sku":"GOR001801630","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50341964218641,"sku":"CIN0006387837G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0006387837.jpg?v=1750875829"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-book-zachary-leader-9780224084673","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow","description":"2015 will mark the centenary of Saul Bellow’s birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader is the first biography since the author’s death and the first to discuss his life and work in its entirety. Leader has been granted unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material and has conducted interviews with Bellow’s relatives, close friends, colleagues and lovers.   The first volume spans the period from Bellow’s birth in 1915 in Lachine, Canada, to the publication of Herzog in 1964. Herzog made Bellow rich as well as famous. By the time of its publication, he was probably the most acclaimed writer in America. The critic James Wood has called him ‘the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century’. Leader’s biography shows how this American prose, with its exhilarating mix of high culture and low, came into existence. It also traces Bellow’s turbulent life away from the desk, as polemicist, teacher, husband, father, and lover. Fierce in his loyalties, Bellow was no less fierce in his enmities, combative in defence of his freedoms. A handsome and seductive man, he was also elusive, with a charm Philip Roth has described as ‘like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge.’ This biography shows what it was like both to meet Bellow and to be him. It takes the full measure of the man and his work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49552134209809,"sku":"GOR006601351","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50625209729297,"sku":"GOR008477512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224084674.jpg?v=1751259278"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-book-zachary-leader-9780224101882","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow","description":"When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens, Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters  rich, famous, critically acclaimed. 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Through detailed exploration of Bellow's writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist's development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities--as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49568704102673,"sku":"GOR009042927","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49989466489105,"sku":"CIN0307268837G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415612457233,"sku":"CIN0307268837VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52996565795089,"sku":"GOR014687043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307268837.jpg?v=1750780751"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-book-zachary-leader-9780099598152","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow","description":"The final volume of the definitive authorised biography of one of the greatest American writers.  ‘A moving testament to one of the last century’s greatest writers’ Sunday Times  At forty-nine, Saul Bellow was at the pinnacle of American letters – he was rich, famous and critically acclaimed, with the best yet to come: Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, all his best stories. He went on to win two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. However, away from his desk, Bellow's life was set to become embroiled in controversy: over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel.   From the women he pursued and his turbulent family relations, to his struggles with cultural relativism and the perceived excesses of civil rights movements, this second and final volume of Zachary Leader's monumental Life of Saul Bellow charts Bellow's heroic energy and will throughout his life, right to the end - where his immense achievements and their costs, to himself and others, became ever more apparent.  'Brilliant' Spectator 'Compelling' Times Literary Supplement 'Riveting' New Statesman 'Superb' New York Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49569310114065,"sku":"GOR012081900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729014235409,"sku":"NGR9780099598152","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099598159.jpg?v=1750939801"},{"product_id":"on-modern-british-fiction-book-zachary-leader-9780199249336","title":"On Modern British Fiction","description":"A landmark collection of newly commissioned essays on British fiction of the last fifty years by the very best contemporary novelists, critics, and academics, including contributions from Martin Amis, P. N. Furbank, Christopher Hitchens, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Patrick Parrinder, Elaine Showalter, James Wood, and Michael Wood. Among the topics discussed are the 'Englishness' of English comic fiction, its political conservatism, fiction and exile, Scottish fiction, the comissioning and editing of modern fiction, reviewing, the adaptation of fiction to television, genre fiction ('Ladlit', science fiction, crime fiction), and fictional form. There are also original essays on individual authors, including Christopher Isherwood, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald, V. S. Pritchett, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. A fascinating collection for anyone seriously interested in modern British fiction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49598303535377,"sku":"GOR002873401","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199249334.jpg?v=1751070391"},{"product_id":"writer-s-block-book-zachary-leader-9780801840326","title":"Writer's Block","description":"\"'Writer's Block' is an organic whole. Leader makes connections and shows differences among the various sections and the different theories. I found the book to be a rich intellectual experience.\"--Ben Davis, 'Wilson Library Bulletin.'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49616071819537,"sku":"GOR007414344","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50366521999633,"sku":"CIN0801840325G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50834577457425,"sku":"GOR007142783","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801840325.jpg?v=1751329093"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-book-zachary-leader-9781101875162","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow","description":"When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens, Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters - rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing some of his greatest fiction (\u003ci\u003eMr Sammler's Planet\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHumboldt's Gift\u003c\/i\u003e, all his best stories), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote \u003ci\u003eRavelstein.\u003c\/i\u003e In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in volume 1. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBellow's relations with women were often fraught. In the 1960s he was compulsively promiscuous (even as he inveighed against sexual liberation). The women he pursued, the ones he married and those with whom he had affairs, were intelligent, attractive and strong-willed. At eighty-five he fathered his fourth child, a daughter, with his fifth wife. His three sons, whom he loved, could be as volatile as he was, and their relations with their father were often troubled. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAlthough an early and engaged supporter of civil rights, in the second half of his life Bellow was angered by the excesses of Black Power. An opponent of cultural relativism, he exercised great influence in literary and intellectual circles, advising a host of institutes and foundations, helping those he approved of, hindering those of whom he disapproved. In making his case, he could be cutting and rude; he could also be charming, loyal, and funny. Bellow's heroic energy and will are clear to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, are also clear.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49772952912145,"sku":"CIN110187516XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51482032603409,"sku":"GOR011887516","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53075910787345,"sku":"CIN110187516XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/110187516X.jpg?v=1751206529"},{"product_id":"life-of-kingsley-amis-book-zachary-leader-9780375424984","title":"The Life of Kingsley Amis","description":"Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post World War I British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader s definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion. \u003cbr\u003eIn The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader, the acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on published and unpublished works and correspondence, but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students, and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken publicly before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis s childhood, school days, and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father, and lover. Neither evading nor sensationalizing the more salacious aspects of Amis s life, Leader explores the writer s phobias, self-doubts, and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence, and personal disaster. \u003cbr\u003eHere is the biography that its subject deserves. Like Amis himself, it is incisive and unsentimental, deeply appreciative of aesthetic achievement, and a great source of amusing anecdotes. Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity, and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49930459709713,"sku":"CIN0375424989G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51450615628049,"sku":"GOR014284950","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53007792242961,"sku":"CIN0375424989VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53578599006481,"sku":"CIN0375424989A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375424989.jpg?v=1751260327"},{"product_id":"on-life-writing-book-zachary-leader-9780198704065","title":"On Life-Writing","description":"Chapter 12 of this publication is open access, available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence, offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.  'Life-writing' is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). On Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to something of the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of 'life,' 'self' and 'story' which help to explain these changing fortunes and features, recent attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, life-writing and psychoanalysis, life-writing and philosophy. The essays mostly focus on individual instances rather than fields, whether historical, theoretical or generic. Generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the 'life-changing encounter,' a frequent trope in literary life-writing, is pondered by Hermione Lee through an account of a much-storied first meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the 'cradle to grave' life-narrative, as well as the potential distortions it breeds, by focusing on Shakespeare biography, in particular attempts to explain Shakespeare's so-called 'lost years'.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50309661982993,"sku":"GOR008257998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B07D7Y6QC1.jpg?v=1751069997"},{"product_id":"life-of-saul-bellow-volume-1-book-zachary-leader-9780307388933","title":"The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 1","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. \u003ci\u003eThe Life of Saul Bellow\u003c\/i\u003e, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, draws on unprecedented access to Bellow's papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist's relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow's writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist's development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities--as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348321014033,"sku":"CIN030738893XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51834220675345,"sku":"CIN030738893XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/030738893X.jpg?v=1751164807"},{"product_id":"life-of-kingsley-amis-book-zachary-leader-9780810127593","title":"The Life of Kingsley Amis","description":"Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post–World War II British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader’s definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion. In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader, the acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on published and unpublished works and correspondence, but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students, and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken publicly before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis’s childhood, school days, and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father, and lover. Neither evading nor sensationalizing the more salacious aspects of Amis’s life, Leader explores the writer’s phobias, self-doubts, and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence, and personal disaster. Here is the biography that its subject deserves. Like Amis himself, it is incisive and unsentimental, deeply appreciative of aesthetic achievement, and a great source of amusing anecdotes. Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity, and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50367908905233,"sku":"CIN0810127598A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0810127598.jpg?v=1758794595"},{"product_id":"on-modern-british-fiction-book-zachary-leader-9780199249329","title":"On Modern British Fiction","description":"A landmark collection of essays on fiction in Britain over the last fifty years, including original contributions by the very best contemporary novelists and critics, such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Wood, and Elaine Showalter. Arranged thematically, pieces include developing a reception in America (Amis), how fiction reviewers have dealt with the English novel (Duguid), on commissioning and editing modern fiction (Franklin), the novel adapted for TV (Howard), modern historical fiction (Mantel), science fiction (Parrinder), crime writing (Priestman), 'Lad lit' after Lucky Jim (Showalter), and essays on Angus Wilson, Angela Carter, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald, V. S. Pritchett, Naipaul, and Rushdie. 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