‘Welcome strangers! Come into my parlour, as a well-known spider said…’ (William Sansom, The Body, 1949) I suspect you will know what I mean when I try to speak of a little literary subgenre we might usefully call ‘the nasty story.’ The type will surely seem clear to you if you have read, just for […]
Read MoreJune 14 2012 is the 30th anniversary of Argentine surrender in the Falklands War of April-June 1982. This month Finds is reissuing Iron Britannia by Anthony Barnett, originally published between covers in 1982 and deriving from writings Barnett first published in the New Left Review. Iron Britannia is a swingeing polemic against the Falklands War, […]
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Rock & Pop are such relatively youthful art-forms that Your Correspondent still finds himself surprised by how swiftly the music of his adolescence (1983-1989) has begun to look a little sepia-toned round the edges. (Presumably one’s parents came to feel the same way about A Hard Day’s Night…) In referring to the ‘look’ over the […]
Read MoreA fine piece by David Collard in the TLS last month made note of the current revived interest in the writings of the remarkable Gerald Kersh, six of whose titles we now offer in Finds. Forty-five years after he left us Kersh still suffers from little better than the ‘large, vague renown’ Orwell famously ascribed […]
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Faber Finds is honoured to have in its care a dazzling selection of the non-fiction works of the late Ian Hamilton (1938-2001). His in Search of J.D. Salinger we re-published back in 2009, but as of now we look forward to bringing back a regular procession of his finest titles across the latter half of […]
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Amid the considerable and deserved publicity for the recent Channel 4 TV adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, Boyd himself took the opportunity to restate the importance to the novel’s inspiration of William Gerhardie, who apparently provided the key model for Boyd’s fictional ‘Logan Mountstuart’. As Boyd told the Guardian, ‘Gerhardie published his last […]
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I am hungry for your presence. I hanker for the great blaze of your glance which when you turn it on me, will burn out the husk of my body and draw my soul to you…’ Julia O’Faolain’s second novel, first published in 1973, offers a rich, vivid portrait of the political and religious turmoil […]
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The various remembrances for Nina Bawden, who died at the end of last month, make fine and instructive reading both for those who have loved her writing and those yet to make the discovery, who will be very much edified, I expect, to learn what a splendid woman she was. The Independent’s Boyd Tonkin praises Bawden’s ‘unfussy excellence’ […]
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‘I met the sad menopausee and offered her, at the flick of a switch, a return of beauty, youth, and desire. And – after all, I’m no stinge-merchant – power and money as well. Why not? If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself … why not a woman, in […]
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The gifted biographer Miranda Seymour wrote Life on the Edge, her biography of Robert Graves, with the full co-operation of Graves’ family and with exclusive access to previously unseen papers. In the midst of this research she also found what would prove the inspiration for her brilliant novel The Telling, based on real events in 1939 when […]
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