Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life--the Day of the Dead, 1938--his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.

"Under the Volcano" remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

While famous for his celebrated novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry always considered himself a poet. First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle--with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle's fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction--but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."-William T. Vollman

It is the fiesta Day of Death in Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life.

Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him, the consul has become an enduring tragic figure. His story, the image of one man's agonized journey towards Calvary, became a prophetic book for a whole generation.

The 1940 Under the Volcano-hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry's 1947 masterpiece-differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry's 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry's exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay systematic attention to convergences and divergences between this earlier work and the 1947 version. Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen's insightful introduction, together with extensive annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large, reveal the depth and breadth of Lowry's complex vision for his work. This critical edition fleshes out our sense of the enormous achievement by this twentieth-century modernist.

Lowry's longest and most ambitious project of the mid-1930s was the autobiographical novel, "In Ballast to the White Sea," about a Cambridge undergraduate who wants to be a novelist but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been "written" by a Norwegian novelist.

Only decades after Lowry's death in 1957 did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript of the book. "In Ballast to the White Sea"--which Lowry once imagined would be the "Paradiso" of his trilogy, with "Under the Volcano "as the "Inferno"and "Swinging the Maelstrom "(or "Lunar Caustic") as the "Purgatorio"--is one of Lowry's most intensely personal works.

The introduction places the narrative in relation to Lowry's sense of himself in the mid-1930s and draws parallels with his post-Volcano writings such as "Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid," "La Mordida," and "Through the Panama." The text of the novel, as well as Chris Ackerley's extensive annotations provide crucial evidence about Lowry's life and art during the 14 years between the publication of "Ultramarine "(1933) and "Under the Volcano "(1947), the only novels he completed and published during his lifetime.

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse (The Last Address, 1936), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon (The Last Address, 1939), to a world that, in spite of all its troubles, leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern (Swinging the Maelstrom,1942-1944).