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 […]
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. […]
In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests. […]
James Joyce’s famous novel Ulysses, published 99 years ago in 1922, takes place on a single day: 16 June 1904. Anthony Burgess celebrates this date in one of the songs from his Ulysses-inspired musical, Blooms of Dublin, with these lyrics: ‘Today / It’s the sixteenth of June today / And from morning till noon / […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD researcher Milena Schwab-Graham writes about her work on the extensive Anthony Burgess cassette tape collection. In This Man and Music (1982), Anthony Burgess’s collection of essays exploring the interconnections between music and literature, he calls himself a ‘faker, a patcher, something […]
When James Joyce died in Zurich on 13 January 1941, Anthony Burgess was a soldier with 189 Field Ambulance in the Royal Army Medical Corps, living in a barracks near Morpeth in Northumberland. News was slow to travel from Switzerland to Britain, and it took more than a week for Burgess to find out that […]
Here Comes Everybody, subtitled ‘An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader’, was commissioned by Joyce’s own publishers, Faber and Faber, in 1963. Burgess’s original title was ‘James Joyce and the Common Man’, and he introduces the book with a provocative statement: ‘If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that […]
Literary playing cards drawn by Anthony Burgess. By Anna Edwards