'So far as the young were concerned,' Orwell wrote of Britain in the years after the Great War, 'the official beliefs were dissolving like sandcastles.' Most critical accounts of that postwar generation have been constrained by having to deal with the myth of the 'thirties.' Michael Gorra's innovation in this exciting study of the postwar generation's major novelists lies in seeing the consequences of that dissolution in formal rather than political terms, arguing that the novelist's difficulty in representing human character in what Wyndham Lewis called a 'shell-shocked' age is itself a sign of that loss of belief. But while most studies of this generation end with the coming of World War 2, Gorra follows these novelists throughout their careers. The result is a book that not only shows how the British novel's increasing consciousness of its own limitations stands as a mirror to the country's loss of power, but also provides memorable portraits of four major twentieth century writers.

A strange and delightful memento of one of the most lasting literary voices of all time, The Daily Henry James is a little book from a great mind. First published with James's approval in 1911 as the ultimate token of fandom a limited edition quote-of-the-day collection titled The Henry James Year Book this new edition is a gift across time, arriving as we mark the centenary of his death. Drawing on the Master's novels, essays, reviews, plays, criticism, and travelogues, The Daily Henry James offers a series of impressions (for if not of impressions, of what was James fond?) to carry us through the year. From the deepest longings of Isabel Archer to James's insights in The Art of Fiction, longer seasonal quotes introduce each month, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. To take but one example: Isabel, in a quote from The Portrait of a Lady for September 30, muses, "She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action." Featuring a new foreword by James biographer Michael Gorra as well as the original introductions by James and his good friend William Dean Howells, this long-forgotten perennial calendar will be an essential bibelot for James's most ardent devotees and newest converts alike, a treasure to be cherished daily, across all seasons, for years, for ages to come.

In "After Empire" Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire--Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie--have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism.
Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in "The Raj Quartet," of the character Hari Kumar--a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces.
"After Empire" provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity--and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.

The Mani, at the tip of Greece's--and Europe's--southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people's daily lives.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene," bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language's finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore.
"Mani" is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's celebrated "Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece."

Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America's history. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualises Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

William Faulkner's provocative and enigmatic 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition builds on the strengths of its predecessors while focusing new attention on both the novel's contemporary reception and its rich cultural and historical contexts. The text for the Third Edition is again that of the corrected text scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the novel. David Minter's annotations, designed to assist readers with obscure words and allusions, have been retained. "Contemporary Reception," new to the Third Edition, considers the broad range of reactions to Faulkner's extraordinary novel on publication. Michael Gorra's headnote sets the stage for assessments by Evelyn Scott, Henry Nash Smith, Clifton P. Fadiman, Dudley Fitts, Richard Hughes, and Edward Crickmay. New materials by Faulkner ("The Writer and His Work") include letters to Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner and Faulkner's Nobel Prize for Literature address. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" begins with Michael Gorra's insightful headnote, which is followed by seven seminal considerations-five of them new to the Third Edition-of southern history, literature, and memory. Together, these works-by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Richard Gray, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, William James, and Henri Bergson-provide readers with important contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" represents eighty-five years of scholarly engagement with The Sound and the Fury. New to the Third Edition are essays by Eric Sundquist, Noel Polk, Doreen Fowler, Richard Godden, Stacy Burton, and Maria Truchan-Tataryn. A Chronology of Faulkner's life and work is newly included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: - The New York Edition of the novel, accompanied by Michael Gorra's introduction and explanatory footnotes. - Background and contextual materials centering on James as a writer, The Portrait of a Lady in revision, and reviews of the novel by James's contemporaries. - Seven important critical essays, chosen for their accessibility. - A Chronology and Suggestions for Further Reading. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

'So far as the young were concerned,' Orwell wrote of Britain in the years after the Great War, 'the official beliefs were dissolving like sandcastles.' Most critical accounts of that postwar generation have been constrained by having to deal with the myth of the 'thirties.' Michael Gorra's innovation in this exciting study of the postwar generation's major novelists lies in seeing the consequences of that dissolution in formal rather than political terms, arguing that the novelist's difficulty in representing human character in what Wyndham Lewis called a 'shell-shocked' age is itself a sign of that loss of belief. But while most studies of this generation end with the coming of World War 2, Gorra follows these novelists throughout their careers. The result is a book that not only shows how the British novel's increasing consciousness of its own limitations stands as a mirror to the country's loss of power, but also provides memorable portraits of four major twentieth century writers.

"As a cultural reporter Michael Gorra is the sort of writer we most like to read: he's smart, humane, felicitious, well-informed, and yet willing to let his innocence--what he shares with us all--develop into provocative and unconventional intellectual curiosity."--Richard Ford

""The Bells in Their Silence" is on one level a deeply thoughtful and seductive meditation on Gorra's year in Germany, and on the uneasy disjunction between Germany's liberal present and its Nazi past. The book is generously illuminated from within by a parallel meditation on the conventions, limitations, and possibilities of the travel narrative. Exemplarily postmodern in its self-awareness, "The Bells in Their Silence" is an engrossing and original contribution to the literature of travel."--Jonathan Raban, author of "Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings"

"Gorra's book announces itself from the very first sentence as a lyrical hybrid travelogue, mixing the personal and impressionistic with the reflective. The writing is smart, witty, informed, and highly readable. One comes away from the book vowing to be more like Gorra--a more observant, more reflective traveler and a more adventurous reader."--Sven Birkerts, author of "An Artificial Wilderness" and "My Sky Blue Trades"

"Gorra has written an unusual book: a melange of travel book and reflections of travel books, with book reviews, readings of literary works, and autobiographical sketches. The combination proves to be extremely effective, providing a multicolored and multilayered picture of a quickly changing country."--Barbara Hahn, Princeton University

"Perhaps no single travelogue on Germany has captured so well our American, post-World WarII generation's tortured relationship to a land and its people we were brought up loving to hate but which we learned to love. Beautifully written against the grain of the traditional travelogue's certainty of judgements and world-weariness, Michael Gorra's travels through Germany reveal the internal and external processes of a 'memory tourist' in a land with too much memory."--James E. Young, author of "The Texture of Memory" and "At Memory's Edge," Professor and Chair of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James s family, the European literary circles George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own."

A great novelist of the sea, a poet of the tropics, a critic of empire and analyst of globalization, a harbinger of the modern spy novel, and an unparalleled observer of the moments in which people are stripped of their illusions, Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This revised edition of "The Portable Conrad" features the best known and most enduring of Conrad's works, including "The Secret Agent", "Heart of Darkness", and "The Nigger of the "Narcissus"", as well as shorter tales like "Amy Forster" and "The Secret Sharer", a selection of letters, and his observations on the sinking of the Titanic.

A wonderful new selection of Henry James's short stories exploring the relationship between art and life, edited by Michael Gorra. This volume gathers seven of the very best of Henry James's short stories, all focussing the relationship between art and life. In 'The Aspern Papers', a critic is determined to get his hands on a great poet's papers hidden in a faded Venetian house - not matter what the human cost. 'The Author of Beltraffio', 'The Lesson of the Master' and 'The Figure in the Carpet' all focus on naive young men's unsettling encounters with their literary heroes. In 'The Middle Years', a dying novelist begins to glimpse his own potential, while 'The Real Thing' and 'Greville Fane' both explore the tension between artistic and commercial success. These fables of the creative life reveal James at his ironic, provocative best. Henry James was born in 1843 in New York and died in London in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Michael Gorra is Professor of English at Smith College and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in biography.