In Mr. Pritchett's view, rules, regulations and blitzes have brought things to such a pass that the moment will come when only the reader "and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together." To prepare for this "unnerving situation" he has re-read and re-assessed some of these authors, and the essays collected in this book are the fruit of his cogitations. Gibbon, Mrs. Gaskell, Dostoevsky, Fielding, Kilvert, Twain, Synge, Swift, Browning, are some of the writers Mr. Pritchett discusses. Names and dates are diverse, but nearly all have one common characteristic: they demonstrate the axiom that past and present are often parallel in most unexpected ways. Swift anticipated modern science and its consequences nearly two hundred years ago. Thackeray drew a modern Mayfair playboy when he created Rawdon Crawley. Huckleberry Finn is blood relation to Charlie Chaplin. These essays should appeal to scholars and the unlearned alike. Those who have...

First published in 1989, here is England's leading man of letters-as old as the century-at the height of his powers, the incomparable V. S. Pritchett, whose brilliantly observed short stories have become classics in his own lifetime. In these six beautifully crafted stories-his latest effort-we see a master at work, casting his eye over the subjects he knows best, the ordinary men and women of England: studious fourteen- year-old Sarah, whose life is changed by a game of hide-and-seek; or Lionel Frazier, the hairdresser, who looks at a woman and sees only her head; or George Andrews, the salesman, for whom new floral carpeting is always an exciting omen. The genius of these stories is their familiarity-almost everyone will recognize a moment or a revelation of his own life in the experiences of Pritchett's utterly individual and incomparably real characters. Renowned in both the United States and England, Pritchett celebrates his eighty-ninth birthday with the...

The critical essays of V.S. Pritchett are unparalleled for their wit, geniality, subtlety and profound good sense. His survey of writers ranges from Fielding and Smollett to Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Nathanael West and William Golding... from Balzac to Dostoevsky and Gorky, with wonderful detours for minor figures. Pritchett's commentaries are short and incisive and are written from the point of view of the engaged reader rather than from the specialized approach of the scholar and formal analyst of literary structure. Not since Virginia Woolf's Common Reader and Edmund Wilson's Shores of Light has there been a collection of critical writings so marked by swiftness of thoughts, lucidity of expression and balance, and sanity of judgement. The result is a revitalizing study of the novel, by a discerning and distinguished writer whose special gift is to reveal new aspects of the greater novels and the lesser.

In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got the bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you.' And nobody in the town provides such a wealth of delicious gossip as 'Noisy' Brackett and his wife Sally. Refusing to pay her bills, chasing her errant husband around the countryside in fast cars, setting fire to the heart of Bob, the local baker, Sally is a gloriously raffish figure of fun. In these three linked novellas Bob relates how Sally finally paid his account, how Noisy got off a motoring charge by sneezing, stole a case of stuffed birds from his own house, and barricaded himself in a cottage with a cardboard Argentinean air-hostess to foil Sally's pursuit. Pritchett's effervescent love of comedy, his gift for storytelling and dialogue, his passionate interest in the seedier, droller goings-on of modern society, have never showed to better advantage than in these light-hearted tales.

First published in 1937, this thrilling novel tells the story of an expedition by three Englishmen into the Brazilian jungle; a journey which turns into an obsessive quest for the truth behind a missionary's disappearance seventeen years earlier. The three men are each linked in different ways to the same woman in England, and her presence overshadows the whole narrative. At the centre of the expedition is Harry Johnson, the son of the missing missionary-a solitary explorer-hero who is obsessed by the woman, Lucy. Charles Wright, the leader of the expedition, is Lucy's step-father, and Gilbert Phillips, the journalist accompanying the party, was once her lover.In Dead Man Leading, a novel of rivalries and intense emotion set in a remote and exotic landscape, V. S. Pritchett examines the obscure motivation behind the explorer's passion for solitude and hardship and his flight from 'normal' life.

VS. Pritchett, master of the short story, is also the most evocative of travel writers. First published in 1967, his portrait of Dublin - its past, politics and people, its grand mansions and curious corners - is as beguiling and eloquent as the city itself, as he writes of the Dublin he knew in the 1920s, of visits to Sean O'Casey and Yeats (brandishing a teapot in his rage at Shaw) and of the changing city forty years later, facing the future but still as eccentric and engaging as ever.

The Other Side of a Frontier is a celebration of the distinguished contribution which V.S. Pritchett has made to English letters over the past fifty years. Introduced by the author, the collection has been chosen from his short stories, literary criticism, biographies and travel writing, and includes extracts from his autobiographies. It provides a perfect introduction to a universally acknowledged master of the English language.

The Camberwell Beauty is a collection of short stories which explore the close-knit world of antique dealers, their obsessions and suspicions, their hatred of customers and the fantasy lives that grow out of the objects they collect. The Lady from Guatemala tells of a celebrated progressive who is haunted in private by an embarrassing admirer, one of the down trodden for whom he has spoken so eloquently in public. Other characters to be met in these stories are Molly, "as noisy as a blowlamp, but pretty", a women who needs two husbands at a time; an innocent young Englishman in Paris who boasts ill-advisedly that he has no mistress, falls in to the Seine and loses his virginity; and a famous producer who plans a film about the twelfth century Albigenses complete with torture, incest, rape and betrayal. This collection of stories shows that Pritchett has a sharp and willing eye for the irrepressible fantasies which colour human existence and an informed curiosity about...

The essays in Lasting Impressions have never before appeared in book form and together they make up, in the author's own words, a journey through different countries and different generations. The subjects range from Bruce Chatwin and Salmon Rushdie to Simon de Beauvoir and Bernard Shaw, from Lorca and Flaubert to John Updike and Walker Percy, from P. G. Wodehouse and Molly Keane to Andre Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Published in the year of 1990, V. S. Pritchett's 90th birthday, Lasting Impressions is a tribute to one of the greatest and best loved writers of our time.

I am,' writes Mr. Pritchett, 'an offensive traveller'-meaning not that he is rude to porters, but that his praise of a country has sometimes been taken by its inhabitants as abuse or ridicule. Be that as it may, his book, which is based upon sojourns in Spain, Turkey, Persia, and the Iron Curtain countries, will delight every English reader. Pritchett's alert eye and relaxed manner, his flair for meeting new places and people without any warping preoccupations, produce the most felicitous results, particularly with the 'Peoples' Democracies', which most travellers approach with a bias to left or right. 'The Communist countries are like schools: the population is trained, and like school children have their own ways of getting round authority.' The low heels and low rents of Czechoslovakia; the high spirits and out spokenness of the Polish; Bulgaria, where the water is delicious and roses grow everywhere; Romania, so obdurate beneath its Latin surface wherever he goes Pritchett...

'It is because we learn from the writers who have either got into difficulties or who have a certain vanity in creating them, that I have chosen Meredith as my subject', says Mr. Pritchett at the beginning of these Clark Lectures for 1969. The Meredith who, as Henry James remarked, 'did the best things best', but whose novels some critics have written off, was in some ways the forerunner of the contemporary novel, its erratic movement, its profusion of metaphor. His strange style was a device for linking his Romance to a real world, and Mr. Pritchett believes that the difficulties of this style have been in any case exaggerated. What he aimed at was comedy; but comedy 'conceived of as theatre'. 'The business of comedy is ruthlessly to expose the false emotions and the false image of oneself.' Meredith's great virtues as a writer of comedy were his power to analyse states of mind and his gift for slipping out of one mind into another. Mr. Pritchett illuminates these virtues no...

V.S. Pritchett explores the connections between Chekhov's life and art, showing how Chekhov often based his fiction on experiences of his difficult early years where he was responsible for his impoverished family, and as a young doctor, reported on the conditions of the Russian penal colony at Sakhalin. Later he continued his medical career, even when he became a well-known writer and playwright.This book focuses on the short stories of Chekhov often neglected in favor of his plays and discusses why Chekhov was a success in both mediums. Pritchett, himself a master of the short story, is a uniquely qualified to write this superb biography."Pritchett...presents a unique critical perspective as a short story master whose work spans this century, interpreting an illustrious predecessor through their shared art." -Boston Globe

Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding that V.S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live there.Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English countryside and, above all, the Mediterranean: first published in book form in 1990, the year of Sir Victor's ninetieth birthday, they are a delight in themselves and a timely reminder of—or introduction to—this most subtle and perceptive of writers.

V. S. Pritchett is widely - and justly-regarded not only as one of the finest short story writers of this century, but as a critic and essayist of astonishing range, perception and originality. Combining an unpretentious common sense with a rare genius for the illuminating insight into the familiar and the neglected alike, his criticism is all the more valuable in an age in which the study of literature has become increasingly arid and arcane; and unlike so many of his academic counterparts, V. S. Pritchett has always had a remarkable ability to epitomise a writer's work - and convey his own enthusiasm for it - within the compass of a short and eminently accessible essay. A Man of Letters brings together a selection of his finest and most representative work from the past forty years, ranging from Smollett and Peacock to Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly, from Henry James and Nathanael West to Stendhal and Proust, from Nabokov and Machado de Assis to Manzoni and...

V.S. Pritchett's Englishness – the dependable Englishness of shabby, bumptious businessmen, shy wives, puritanical suburbanites and vinegar-tongued grandmothers – often came out in surprising ways. Though comfortably set in the dirty brick factories south of the river or the dreary commuter villages on the outskirts of London, a story will show a Russian sense of passing time or a French pertness, glow poetically like a Bruno Schulz, or wound with the terrible detail of a Danilo Kis. The innate knowledge of the insider is registered with the outsider's shocked vividness.The fourteen stories of It May Never Happen show Pritchett's distinctive mastery. A fearful sailor falls into temptation ashore. An evangelist of the Church of the Last Purification arrives in a provincial town to demonstrate the non-existence of evil. A party of cyclists mistakes a private house for a pub. Two business partners fall out over money and a typist called Miss Croft with a 'small waist'...