Martin Amis, who died in May 2023 at the age of 73, was one of the most widely admired figures in Anglo-American literary fiction, bestriding the world of books like a colossus from the 1970s until the 2020s. He engaged widely with contemporary fiction through his work as a literary journalist and interviewer. It was […]
Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in […]
The latest publication to emerge from the Burgess Foundation’s archive of manuscripts is Chatsky and Miser, Miser! In these two stage plays, published for the first time by Salamander Street, Burgess adapts and revives major monuments of French and Russian theatre: The Miser by Molière and the Russian comedy Chatsky by Alexander Griboyedov. Chatsky, to […]
Anthony Burgess published his shorter version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1966. He was invited to edit the book by Peter du Sautoy, one of Joyce’s executors and a senior publisher at Faber, following the success of Burgess’s BBC television documentary about Joyce, Silence, Exile and Cunning, broadcast the previous year. Faber had already […]
Preserving the Burgess Foundation’s collection of books, archival records, and objects is an ongoing challenge. Time spent in countries such as Malaya and Brunei, as well as travels throughout Europe, America, and the UK, brought with it exposure to termites, damp, floods, heat, and sunlight. Such conditions, coupled with frequent handling and the passage of […]
There seems to be a widespread assumption, often repeated on social media, that Anthony Burgess was a political conservative whose novels promote a right-wing agenda. Although Burgess sometimes claimed to take no interest in party politics, his position turns out to be a more complicated one than expected. Looking into his novels, autobiographical works and […]
2022 is the sixtieth publication anniversary of A Clockwork Orange, which appeared in Britain in May 1962. In the first in a series of articles about the publishing history and critical reception of the novel, we consider the book’s Russian context. Many readers have wondered why Anthony Burgess decided to use Russian as the basis […]
Notes on Anthony Burgess and James Joyce for the Ulysses centenary. Here Comes Everybody Burgess’s introductory guide to James Joyce, described by the author as ‘a sort of pilot commentary,’ was published by Faber in 1965. Burgess guides the reader through each of Joyce’s works, including lesser-known books such as Pomes Pennyeach and Stephen Hero. […]
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we are presenting an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month we’ll be sharing […]
Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Anthony Burgess made millions from the film of A Clockwork Orange. Fact: Anthony Burgess sold the film rights to his novel for $5,000, and later had to sue for a tiny percentage of the profits. It is widely believed that anyone involved in a successful film reaps substantial financial rewards. Stanley Kubrick’s […]