British Literature Series – serie

Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. We learn of her involvement with drugs and increasing self-delusion. After a crack-up, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances; how calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge?

Nicholas Mosley brings the unblinking probing of a scientist to bear on the workings of the writer’s imagination. The result is a constantly stimulating, frequently startling, and always cheerfully unorthodox autobiography.As a novelist, biographer, editor, and screenwriter, Nicholas Mosley has always been concerned with the central paradox of writing: if by definition fiction is untrue, and biography never complete, is there a form that will enable a writer to get at the truth of a life? In Efforts at Truth Mosley scrutinizes his own life and work, but examines them as a curious observer, fascinated by the constant interaction of reality and the written word.As a life, it has been colorful, in settings ranging from the West Indies to a remote Welsh hill farm, from war action in Italy to battles with Hollywood moguls, from the Colony Room to the House of Lords. In print, the range has been as wide: editor of a controversial religious magazine, author of the acclaimed novel series Catastrophe Practice, screenwriter of his own work with Joe Losey and John Frankenheimer, biographer of his notorious father Oswald Mosley, and, in 1990, winner of the Whitbread Award for his novel Hopeful Monsters.Efforts at Truth, Mosley’s distinctive autobiography, brings together the singular life and intricate mind of an important, multifaceted writer.

"Natalie Natalia"?is Nicholas Mosley's brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague.The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.

This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art's ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel.

Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

In his recent novels--including his award-winning Hopeful Monsters--Nicholas Mosley has investigated the patterns that govern our mental and emotional lives and the possibilities that we have for change, and nowhere has he explored such themes with greater concentration than in Catastrophe Practice. A unique book whose characters and concerns are the basis for the other four novels of the Catastrophe Practice Series - Hopeful Monsters, Imago Bird, Judith, and Serpent-- Catastrophe Practice is remarkable both in its form (three plays with prefaces and a novella) and in its ability to convey the complexities of thought. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters of Catastrophe Practice struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters (and the author) feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive--conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations--and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.

A poetic book of voices, landscapes and the passing of time, Ann Quin's finely wrought novel reflects the multiple meanings of the very word "passages." Two characters move through the book--a woman in search of her brother, and her lover (a masculine reflection of herself) in search of himself. The form of the novel, reflecting the schizophrenia of the characters, is split into two sections--a narrative, and a diary annotated with those thoughts that provoked the entries.

"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard--paralyzing the professor and killing his guest--the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting detectives as a twelve-year-old mathematician, his mother, his beloved, a palmist named Miss Prentice, and a bureaucrat dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia. The clues they unearth--drawing on logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between--lead them far away from the tiny seaside town where they begin. We follow them to Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London, but in the end, the solution lies beyond even the furthest and most magical reaches of reason.

"Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "the sex war" is an abiding theme throughout. "Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Following his anthologies Man + Dog (2009) and Man + Doctor (2012), Nick Wadley has, with our encouragement, compiled this collection of drawings around the theme of Man + Table. Tracing origins in the childhood world of “under the table,” he enjoys an habitual freedom to follow his nose, exploring predictable and unpredictable aspects of the subject, from the commonplace to the surreal and absurd.

In this sequel to his recent novel God’s Hazard and the theological meditations of his classic Experience and Religion, Nicholas Mosley shifts between essay and fiction in his examination of the place of faith in contemporary culture. Mosley embraces with cautious optimism the evidence of a growing “thaw” (in fiction, film, and public discourse) regarding the acceptance of religion in the modern world, and presents his own daring contribution to this trend: a story of a modern-day Holy Family formed by a male writer, a woman, and her son of dubious parentage. Taking a stand against both the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and sectar- ian fundamentalism, Mosley argues for a clear-sighted form of deistic faith based not on unquestioning certainty but on an ongoing reappraisal of truth and ethics.

November may be said to have four sets of protagonists: a group of night- shift workers in southeast France; their friends, relatives, lovers, and acquaintances; the factory in which they work; and the work itself.Christopher Woodall is a writer and translator. His translations include Piero Camporesi’s Exotic Brew and Lydie Salvayre’s The Company of Ghosts. November is his first novel.This novel takes place over the course of two and a half hours one evening in November 1976 at the plastic die-casting workshop where these men are employed. Staggering in scope, November is a virtuosic performance -a contemporary take on the classical modernist novel, anatomizing the ways we live, think, and labor; what we have lost; and what we are losing.