John Sutherland

DIVThis 'little history' takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the grown-ups in their lives on an entertaining journey 'through the wardrobe' to a greater awareness of how literature from across the world can transport us and help us to make sense of what it means to be human. Sutherland introduces great classics in his own irresistible way, enlivening his offerings with humor as well as learning: Beowulf, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the Romantics, Dickens, Moby Dick, The Waste Land, Woolf, 1984, and dozens of others. He adds to these a less-expected, personal selection of authors and works, including literature usually considered well below 'serious attention' - from the rude jests of Anglo-Saxon runes to The Da Vinci Code. With masterful digressions into various themes - censorship, narrative tricks, self-publishing, taste, creativity, and madness - Sutherland demonstrates the full depth and intrigue of reading. For younger readers, he offers a proper introduction to literature, promising to interest as much as instruct. For more experienced readers, he promises just the same./div

A Little History of Literature

Anton Chekhov

Ronald Wilks

A Russian country magistrate recounts the murder of the young mistress of a local count, during a shooting party the count had organized for his guests, in an all-new translation of the playwright's only novel. Original.

The Shooting Party

H.G. Wells

When Mr. Polly grows tired of his wife's nagging and his job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters, he concludes that the only way to escape his sad existence is by burning his shop to the ground and killing himself.

The History of Mr Polly

Anthony Trollope

Rumor and jealousy cause Louis Trevelyan to mistakenly question his wife's loyalty, ultimately ruining his life and marriage.

He Knew He Was Right

The anticipated follow-up to the book lovers' favorite, Literary Wonderlands, LITERARY LANDSCAPES delves deep into the geography, location, and terrain of our best-loved literary works and looks at how setting and environmental attributes influence storytelling, character, and our emotional response as readers. Fully-illustrated with hundreds of full-color images throughout. Some stories couldn't happen just anywhere. As is the case with all great literature, the setting, scenery, and landscape are as central to the tale as any character, and just as easily recognized. LITERARY LANDSCAPES brings together more than 50 literary worlds and examines how their description is intrinsic to the stories that unfold within their borders. Follow Leopold Bloom's footsteps around Dublin. Hear the music of the Mississippi River steamboats that set the score for Huckleberry Finn. Experience the rugged bleakness of New Foundland in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News or the soft Neapolitan breezes in My Brilliant Friend. The landscapes of enduring fictional characters and literary legends are vividly brought to life, evoking all the sights and sounds of the original works. LITERARY LANDSCAPES will transport you to the fictions greatest lands and allow you to connect to the story and the author's intent in a whole new way.

Charting the Worlds of Classic Literature

Literary Landscapes

Readers of Victorian fiction must often have tripped up on seeming anomalies, enigmas, and mysteries in their favourite novels. Does Becky kill Jos at the end of Vanity Fair? Why does no one notice that Hetty is pregnant in Adam Bede? How, exactly, does Victor Frankenstein make his monster? Why does Dracula come to England rather than himself an invisible suit? Why does Sherlock Holmes, of all people, get the name of his client wrong? In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (well, is he?) JohnSutherland investigates 34 conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction. Applying these `real world' questions to fiction is not in any sense intended to catch out the novelists who are invariably cleverer than their most detectively-inclined readers. Typically, one finds a reason for the seeming anomaly. Not blunders, that is, but unexpected felicities and ingenious justifications. In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? John Sutherland, recently described by Tony Tanner as `a sort of Sherlock Holmes ofliterature', pays homage to the most rewarding of critical activities, close reading and the pleasures of good-natured pedantry.

Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction

Is Heathcliff a Murderer?

Edebiyatin Kisa Tarihi

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER IN A BRAND NEW EDITION 'Enchanting...the most engagingly boffiny book imaginable.' Spectator Does Becky kill Jos at the end of Vanity Fair? Why does no one notice that Hetty is pregnant in Adam Bede? How, exactly, does Victor Frankenstein make his monster? Readers of Victorian fiction often find themselves tripping up on seeming anomalies, enigmas and mysteries in their favourite novels. In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? John Sutherland investigates 34 conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction, paying homage to the most rewarding of critical activities: close reading and the pleasures of good-natured pedantry

Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

When William Whittlestaff becomes guardian to the penniless daughter of an old friend, he finds himself gradually falling in love with her. But Mary is herself in love with John Gordon, who has gone to seek his fortune in the Kimberley diamond fields. The Oxford edition of An Old Man's Love, Trollope's last completed work is the only annotated edition in print and is accompanied by two appendices detailing its fascinating composition.

An Old Man's Love

Jolyon Connell

When The Great Gatsby was first published, in 1925, reviews were mixed. H.L. Mencken called it “no more than a glorified anecdote”. L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, thought Fitzgerald deserved “a good shaking”: “The Great Gatsby is evidently not a satire; but one would like to think that Mr Fitzgerald’s heart is not in it, that it is a piece of mere naughtiness.” Yet, gradually the book came to be seen as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – of American novels. Why? What is it that makes this story of a petty hoodlum so compelling? Why has a novel so intimately rooted in its own time “lasted” into ours? What is it that posterity, eight decades later, finds so fascinating in this chronicle of the long-gone “Jazz Age”, flappers, speakeasies and wild parties? It is, after all, scarcely a novel at all, more a long short story. But it has a power out of all proportion to its length. It is beautifully written, making it feel even shorter than it is, and is full of haunting imagery. It is also, perhaps, the most vivid literary evocation of the “Great American Dream”, about which it is profoundly sceptical, as it is about dreams generally. In the end, however, as D.H. Lawrence would put it, it is “on the side of life”. Gatsby’s dream may be impossible, so much so that the book can end in no other way than with his death, but up to a point he is redeemed by it and by the tenacity with which he clings to it. It is this that makes the novel so moving and so haunting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

A Sunday Times top-five bestseller 'This is a remarkable book . . . profound and deeply moving . . . It has as much to tell us about mental illness as it does about policing' Alastair Stewart John Sutherland joined the Met in 1992, having dreamed of being a police officer since his teens. Rising quickly through the ranks, he experienced all that is extraordinary about a life in blue: saving lives, finding the lost, comforting the broken and helping to take dangerous people off the streets. But for every case with a happy ending, there were others that ended in desperate sadness, and in 2013 John suffered a major breakdown. Blue is his memoir of crime and calamity, of adventure and achievement, of friendship and failure, of serious illness and slow recovery. With searing honesty, it offers an immensely moving and personal insight into what it is to be a police officer in Britain today.

A Memoir – Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces

Blue

As the annual flood of published novels grows ever greater, it’s a hard a job to keep up, let alone sort the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, literary sleuth and academic John Sutherland is on hand to do precisely that. In the course of over 500 wittily informative pieces he gives us his own very personal take on the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written – the perfect reading list for the would-be literary expert. His taste is impressively eclectic. An appreciation of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass – arguably the first-ever novel – is followed by a consideration of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. The Handmaid’s Tale is followed by Hangover Square, Jane Eyre by Jaws. There are imposing Victorian novels, entertaining contemporary thrillers and everything in between, from dystopian works to romance. The flavour of each is brilliantly evoked and its relative merits or demerits assessed. At the same time, John Sutherland shows how the work fits into a broader context – whether that of the author’s life or of other books from the same genre or period. And he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid £20 for Black Beauty? Encyclopedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate. It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so bite-sized pieces.

A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities

How to be Well Read

Miraculously defying the odds, the SS Fort Lauderhall survived a torpedo attack while in convoy during WWII. Strategists put forward various reasons as to why she hadn’t sunk, but could they be wrong? Perhaps the SS Fort Lauderhall was ill-starred from the beginning? A decade or so later she was found by a fast cargo passenger liner drifting in the South Atlantic - abandoned, except for two bodies. The search party which boarded her discovered ominous signs of something untoward but nothing to indicate why she had been left crewless, or why her hands had taken to only two of the four lifeboats. Was it mutiny or sea gremlins? Had sea fever turned some of her crew into mass murderers? Or had some disastrous phenomena overtaken her? Under the command of a less than inspiring captain the outlook of her ill-starred beginning manifests itself. Only after discovering why her hands take to the lifeboats, can answers be found.

Meltpoint

Two-Shot's very best friend was Mildew Scatterbrain, the scarecrow. Mildew stood in the middle of his field all day in all weather and throughout the seasons and the years. The wind pulled at his clothes and his straw filling. He got wet in the rain, and he got baked in the sun, yet he never complained. The mice who lived in his head tried to keep him stuffed with straw, but even that was soon lost from all of the holes in his clothes, which were falling to bits around him. Two-Shot felt sorry for him and decided, one day, that Mildew deserved to be better dressed. So that's what he did. He felt very good about what he did to make that happen, but the farmer didn't, because the new suit that Mildew was now dressed in, was the farmer's best suit.

The Two-Shot Stories

The Two-Shot Stories: 06. Two-Shot Helps His Friend

Stephen Fender

Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries. In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends Stephen Fender and John Sutherland turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer. Find out why 16 June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963 and why Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949 in this sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.

Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature

Love, Sex, Death and Words

Veronica Melnyk

This is the first-ever book length study of one of the most important and constantly innovative 19th century book and periodical publishers. The mysterious and often elusive but enormously influential Henry Colburn (c.1784 - 16 August 1855) was the pre-eminent publisher of 'silver-fork' novels, and of many influential new writers. Colburn's main claim to rehabilitation are his troop of 'name' authors: Lady Morgan, Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Captain Marryat, G.P.R James, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, Mrs. Catherine Gore, Mrs. Caroline Norton, Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Richard Cobbold, R. S. Surtees. Many would not have had a start in the careers they later enjoyed were it not for Colburn. This is a lively, and important new work on early 19th-century publishing and the patterns for the century which Colburn set. It sketches in tantalizing outlines the Regency, early nineteenth-century and Victorian book trades - and the consequences of Colburn's impact on those worlds. In addition, the work centres on Colburn's most celebrated authors. The book - which is well illustrated - contains the first catalogue of Colburn's publications. Thus far, literary and publishing history have drawn a formidable charge sheet against Henry Colburn. In personal pedigree he is slandered as a 'guttersnipe', or a 'royal bastard'. In Disraeli's pungent description he was a publishing 'bawd', engaged in wholesale literary prostitution. A very bad thing. And yet this publishing Barabbas can be argued to have been innovative and a force for constructive change in the rapidly evolving book trade and---paradoxically---a man of taste. Various rumours circulated that he was either a bastard of the Duke of York or of Lord Landsdowne. Date uncertain. He liked to weave illustrious (typically mendacious) pedigrees for himself as much as for his dubiously aristocratic purveyors of silver forkery. What, precisely, did Colburn do that should raise his reputation and make us see him as a good thing? In the largest sense he demonstrated, by example and practice, the need for consolidation between hitherto dismembered arms of the London book world. Beginning his career at apprentice level in the London West End circulating-library business he went on, having learned at the counter what the customer wanted, to become the undisputed market leader in the publication of three-volume novels and (sub-Murray) travel books. The three-decker went on to become the foundation-stone of the 'Leviathan' library system (Mudie's and Smith's) and created a seventy-year stability in the publishing, distribution and reception of English fiction. In 1814 Colburn founded the New Monthly Magazine. In 1817, he set up England's first serious weekly review, the Literary Gazette. In 1828 he helped found the Athenaeum (distant parent of today's New Statesman). His behaviour, as a magazine proprietor and editor at large was typically outrageous. But the link he forged between higher journalism and literature was momentous.

The 'Prince of Puffers' : the Life and Works of the Publisher Henry Colburn

Rogue Publisher

Childhood and Later Recollections of Rosemary Marion Sutherland

Analyse van de crisissituatie waarin de nieuwe literaire roman zich sinds de jaren zeventig bevindt o.a. als gevolg van gewijzigde uitgevers- en bibliotheek-politiek

Fiction and the Fiction Industry

Thackeray at Work

Bringing a young man into an all girls' school, where many of those girls were reaching that difficult and dangerous age with boys, was a risk, but Steve's references had been outstanding, and his qualifications, stellar. The principal had interviewed him personally, reaching the conclusion that he would be impervious to all but the most determined young woman, but then what man had a hide that thick? She would keep track of him where needed, and would know where he was at all times.He and Margaret bumped into each other a couple of times. She had learned that he was refurbishing the swimming pool, and asked if she might see it. Unfortunately, she accidentally sent him into the pool, falling in with him. What now? They would shower of course, but fully clothed, at first, to get rid of the chlorine smell. But what then? She would have to trust him.As difficult as all that had been, it got more intense a year later when she caused another accident for him. This one was more engaging, and also got significantly out of hand between them in a very passionate and intimate way, but not one that either of them was likely to regret. Not the way they began to feel for each other.

John Sutherland

Books

Your next favorite book is out there