Contemporary writing is arguably the most exciting and attractive reading matter for a vast majority of readers--but by its nature it is the least charted. What, for instance, are the most interesting novels written in Israel in the last few years? Who are the leading contemporary writers in Australia? Or, for that matter, in the United States? Now, The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing--uniquely international in range and up to date in coverage--provides in 28 insightful and eminently readable chapters an accessible, informative, and fluent account of all that is most significant and worth reading in the mass of writing since 1960.
Truly international in scope, The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing covers the recent literature of cultures as various as Australian and Spanish-American, French, Israeli, and Canadian, New Zealand and Russian, as well as American, English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish. Here are discussions of the movements, noteworthy publishing events, and literary happenings in world cultures, with frank and lively opinions on the individuals and artists involved, including James Wood on the English, ("Intelligence is A.S.] Byatt's greatest problem as a writer. She has never learned how to subjugate it"); John Taylor on the French (he dubs Debord's Panegyric the "most remarkably pure autobiography of recent times"); Rhys Williams on the literature of German-speaking countries ("This was the generation of the student movement, but also of urban terrorism"); Mark Morris on Japan (who explains the difference between shosetsu, roughly akin to the novel, and junbungaku, or "pure literature"). Not merely an annotated bibliography of authors and titles, The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Literature is an intriguing narrative in its own right, and a provocative source for new reading ideas and divergent literary paths to tread. Written by experts, but demanding no specialist knowledge of the reader, it concentrates on fiction and poetry, but is generously inclusive in its scope; each chapter provides a wealth of biographical and background information, informed criticism, suggestions for further reading, and an often controversial view of contemporary writing and its development.
Sturrock's aim in compiling The Guide has been to create a volume that is helpful, but not definitive: the judgements it contains may invite disagreement, but they are offered in a spirit of incitement and excitement about reading and writing, a roadmap to previously unknown or obscure authors worth tracking down, or whole literatures worth a closer look. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Literature will be an invaluable companion for anyone for whom a good book is time well spent.

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Sodom and Gomorrah--now in a superb translation by John Sturrock--takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust's novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.First time in Penguin ClassicsA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with French flaps and luxurious designThe first completely new translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s

Hugo's powerful evocation of Paris in 1482 and the tragic tale of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame, has become a classic example of French romanticism.

‘A giant miniature, full of images, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time’ 
Jean Cocteau

In this fourth volume, Proust’s novel takes up for the first time the theme of homosexual love – male and female – and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Sodom and Gomorrah is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles earlier on now reappear in a different light and take centre stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.

Arthur Rimbaud was one of the wildest, most uncompromising poets of his age, although his brief literary career was over by the time he was twenty-one when he embarked on a new life as a trader in Africa. This edition brings together his extraordinary poetry and more than a hundred of his letters, most of them written after he had abandoned literature. A master of French verse forms, the young Rimbaud set out to transform his art, and language itself, by a systematic "disordering of all the senses," often with the aid of alcohol and drugs. The result is a highly innovative, modern body of work, obscene and lyrical by turns--a rigorous journey to extremes.

Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock's new translation includes Rimbaud's greatest verse, as well as his record of youthful torment, A Season in Hell (1873), and letters that unveil the man who turned his back on poetry.Includes a generous selection of Rimbaud's major poetry followed by more than 100 of his lettersContains the French text of the poems on facing pagesIntroduction examines Rimbaud's two very different careers

An elegant guide to twentieth-century French literature and thought. The Word from Paris is a lucid and accessible guide to the literature and thought of twentieth-century France. John Sturrock ranges over the broad landscape of French writing, clarifying the various intellectual movements that have marked its recent history. In a series of definitive essays, John Sturrock discusses writers such as Proust, Celine, Sarraute and Perec; thinkers such as Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Derrida; and that peculiarly French figure, the writer/thinker: Sartre, Camus and Barthes. He analyses such developments as Existentialism, the New Novel, Structuralism and the OuLiPo. This elegant and illuminating journey through both celebrated and sometimes relatively neglected texts is an invaluable initiation into French intellectual and literary culture this century.

This textbook series is ambitious in scope. It provides concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will cumulatively form a substantial library of textbooks on some of the most important and widely read literary masterpieces. Each book is devoted to a single work and provides a close reading of that text, as well as a full account of its historical, cultural, and intellectual background, a discussion of its influence, and a guide to further reading. The contributors to the series, are given complete freedom in the choice of their critical method. Where the text is written in a language other than English, full account is taken of readers studying the text in English translation. While critical jargon is avoided, important technical terminology is fully explained, and thus this series will be genuinely accessible to students at all levels and to general readers. Journey to the End of the Night is a novel of savage, exultant misanthropy, full of cynical humour and of the blackest pessimism in respect of humanity. Its millions of readers across the world have admired it uneasily, dismayed by Celine's morbidity, yet fascinated by his virtuosity as a writer. In this detailed study, John Sturrock shows why that admiration is absolutely in order, and why this extraordinary work should be acknowledged as one of the chief literary landmarks of the twentieth century.

The urge to autobiography reveals itself every day, in the stories we tell about ourselves. Literary autobiography is the most highly developed form of this universal activity of self-promotion, a kind of writing practised in the west over many centuries. In this major study of the western tradition, John Sturrock analyses the means by which more than twenty of the greatest literary autobiographers have gone about their task. The book concentrates on the productive tension between the writer's will to singularity and the autobiographical act itself, which restores by conventional and rhetorical means the harmony between the writer and a community of readers. By attending closely and sceptically to the truth-claims made by autobiographers from Augustine through Rousseau and Darwin to Sartre and Michel Leiris, Sturrock establishes some of the deep, hidden continuities of autobiographical writing, and shows how artful and self-conscious this supposedly most sincere of literary genres can be.

With the aim of widening the scope of Marxist theory, Henri Lefebvre finished Dialectical Materialism just before the beginning of World War II and the Resistance movement against the Vichy regime. As the culmination of Lefebvre's interwar activities, the book highlights the tension-fraught relationship between Lefebvre and the French Communist Party (PCF). For Lefebvre, unlike for the PCF, Marxism was above all a dynamic movement of theory and practice. Dialectical Materialism is an implicit response to Joseph Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism and an attempt to show that the Stalinist understanding of the concept was dogmatic and oversimplified. This edition contains a new introduction by Stefan Kipfer, explaining the book's contemporary ramifications in the ever-expanding reach of the urban in the twentieth-century Western world.