UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · FANTASY FICTION
Mervyn Peake
Also known as: Mervyn Laurence Peake, M. Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 – 17 November 1968) was a British writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology. Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children (Letters from a Lost Uncle, 1948), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye (1953), a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
— from Collected Poems, 2005
Most acclaimed
Collected Poems
2005
Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valery, W. B. Yeats, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, this great writer produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All of the poems - in verse and prose - that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarme's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals.^ Deeply affected by the religious crisis that shook the world of nineteenth-century intellectuals, Mallarme saw his task as "the Orphic explanation of the earth." His response was to develop a symbolic vocabulary with which to explore the deepest philosophical questions in highly condensed forms. Whether writing poetry in verse (the Poesies) or prose (the Poemes en Prose), or inventing an altogether new genre - as he did in the amazing "Un Coup de Des," his final work - Mallarme was a poet not only of supreme artistry but of great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarme's poetry for the twentieth-century reader, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary, which is an important work of criticism in its own right. Here the translator defines the major symbols in the poems, elucidates many of the difficulties and complexities of the poetry, and sets each poem in the larger context of the work as a whole.^ Weinfield also includes an introduction and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Publication of the Collected Poems is a major literary event in the English-speaking world. Here at last are the poetic works of an important figure in modern literature, masterfully translated and presented.
Gormenghast
1967
"Titus Groan is seven, Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral stairacse to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder"--P. of cover.
The glassblowers
1950
According to "First edition of poems Mervyn Peake wrote when, in his words, he was "commissioned as a war-artist to record my impressions of work in a glass-blowing factory near Birmingham, I found on entering the huge, ruinous, grimy, wharf-walled buildings a world upon its own, a place of roaring fires and monstrous shadows.""