Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess – serie

A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil’s Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce’s Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured.The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess’s forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

This man and music asks two central questions: what can literature contribute to the art of composition, and how can music influence the writer? Anthony Burgess, famed novelist, journalist, and composer, answers these questions and many more. As a person uniquely qualified to look at the interconnectivity of music and literature from both sides, Burgess provides fascinating insights, drawing on his deep knowledge of both disciplines. The book contains eleven interconnected essays that touch on philosophical conundrums of art and adaptation, questions of meaning, and the author’s own personal experience. It is a must-read for fans of Burgess who want to understand how music influenced the author’s craft of writing. Part autobiography and part literary and musical analysis, This man and music is a unique artefact in the stunning output of a prolific artist.

Anthony Burgess draws upon an autobiographical episode to create Beard’s Roman Women, the story of a man haunted by his first wife, presumed dead. But is she? A marvellously economical book, full-flavoured, funny, and heartfelt, showing its author at the height of his powers. This new edition is the first to be published with David Robinson’s photographs for over forty years. The text of the novel has been restored using the original typescripts, and Graham Foster’s new introduction provides valuable insight into the fictional and biographical contexts of the novel. The text is fully annotated with a detailed set of notes and this edition includes the previously unpublished script for Burgess’s television film By the Waters of Leman: Byron and Shelley at Geneva, and a rare piece of Burgess’s writing about Rome.

Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, Burgess’s novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art. This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of even Anthony Burgess’s fiction in an attempt to understand Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script.As gracefully witty as it is daringly experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess’s late, great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly original to this day.This new critical edition with analysis from noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley enables this work’s significance to be assessed by a new generation of readers and scholars.

Puma – disentangled from the three-part structure of The End of the World News and published here for the first time in its intended format – is Anthony Burgess’s lost science fiction novel. Set some way into the future, the story details the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy – the dreaded Puma. It is a visceral book about the end of history as man has known it. Despite its apocalyptic theme, its earthquakes and tidal waves, murder and madness, Puma is a gloriously-comic novel, steeped in the rich literary heritage of a world soon to be extinguished and celebrating humanity in all its squalid glory. In Burgess’s hands this meditation on destruction, mitigated by the hope of salvation for a select few, becomes powerful exploration of friendship, violence, literature and science at the end of the world.