Böcker av Malcolm Bradbury

At the height of the 1960s, a British writer accepts an academic post in America for a year that he'll never forget English author James Walker has three books to his name, each greeted with middling success and then promptly forgotten. But his resume is significant enough to earn him a yearlong appointment at Benedict Arnold University as the American college's writer in residence. At Benedict Arnold, Walker is something of a celebritya firebrand of 1960s British literary culture whose work, though perhaps met with shrugs at home, is the subject of vibrant scholarly criticism among American academics. Walker, of course, is not quite what some were expecting, and culture clashes abound as he encounters the tropes of American academia in the sixties. Fusty, buttoned-up professors, spirited advocates of free love, and aggressively ambitious colleagues collide to ensure that Walker's year in America will be anything but ordinary.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for. Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War.

A headstrong young journalist goes on the adventure of a lifetime, traveling through Europe to find the world's most enigmatic philosopher Bazlo Criminale is one of Europe's most legendary living men. A mysterious novelist and thinker known for his extreme elusiveness, the beloved Criminale is a cultural icon of the highest order. Seeking to find the man behind the myth, a London television-news station hires Francis Jay, an enterprising young reporter, to find Criminale. From Vienna to Budapest to the picturesque lakeshores of Italy, Jay journeys across the continentand even briefly to Brazilinterviewing the man's biographer, his publisher, and his former lover, all of whom have their own interests at stake. Through literary award dinners and other examples of ';culture as spectacle,' Jay must navigate the chaotic world of postCold War Europe as he chases the specter of a literary legend.

Looking to strike it rich with television gold, an English media tycoon enlists the help of an unassuming novelist to script his small-screen epic, to disastrousand hilariouseffect The year is 1986, and the cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher's government have trickled down to university life, where departments are being forced to shave their payrolls to account for reduced public funding. Meanwhile, at Eldorado Television, a different kind of cut is about to wreak havoc. Lord Mellow, head of the declining studio, watches as his last-ditch effort to produce a hit series falls to pieces. The show's star, the volatile but vaunted Sir Luke Trimingham, has just declared that he will quit unless the script is entirely rewritten. Desperate to save the project, Eldorado brings university lecturer and author Henry Babbacombe into the fold to write thirteen new episodes of ambitious televisionsomething so grand that the leading man cannot possibly refuse it. But the production is plagued from the start, suffering endless calamities with its unpredictable actors and crew, whose behind-the-scenes drama rivals anything Babbacombe could dream up.

Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard's desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard's wife Barbara, promiscuous '70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood. The History Man is Malcolm Bradbury's masterpiece and the definitive campus novel of the 1970s. It brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles and abuse at the highest level as the Machiavellian Howard effortlessly seduces his way around campus.

In seven short stories Malcolm Bradbury takes a subtly ironic look at a variety of targets: American academics, provincial Britain, the aspirations of social workers, psychologists, the well-intentioned. . . In addition he delights us with an irreverent and hilarious series of parodies of some of the greatest paradigms of the British and American literary scenes: a passage from Iris Murdoch's little-known The Sublime and the Ridiculous; Muriel Spark (a whole novel); the fifth volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet; John Osborne; J. D. Salinger and many more. 'A very funny book indeed. Malcolm Bradbury is a satirist of great assurance and accomplishment' Observer 'Bradbury's eye is sharp, his trigger-finger steady and unafraid, and his range and explosive power devastating' The Times

It is the summer of 1986 and the cutting, trimming and shrinking of public funds is much in the news. Education, health, the arts - all are being deprived of money. But while the university where the obscure but critically sound writer Henry Babbacombe teaches is having to cut down on staff, a northern television company is having a last spree before the money runs out. And who should they choose for their writer but Henry Babbacombe? Wrenched from the privacy and seclusion of his garden shed into the spotlight of the media, Henry learns a thing or two about what it takes to be successful in Mrs Thatcher's Britain.

To the Hermitage tells two stories. The first is of the narrator, a novelist, on a trip to Stockholm and Russia for an academic seminar called the Diderot Project. The second takes place two hundred years earlier and recreates the journey the French philosopher Denis Diderot made to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a woman whose influence could change the path of history . . . Malcolm Bradbury's last novel is rich with his satirical wit, but it is also deeply personal and weaves a wonderfully wry self-portrait.

Slaka! Land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor. Slaka! Land whose borders are sometimes here, often further north, and sometimes not at all! Dr Petworth is on a cultural exchange to the small (and fictional) Eastern European country of Slaka. Pallid and middle-aged, Dr Petworth might appear stuffy, but during his short stay he manages to embroil himself in the thorny thickets of sexual intrigue and love, while still finding time to see the major sites. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983, Rates of Exchange took Bradbury's satirical gifts to a new level.

This anthology is in many was a best of the best , containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all '

A master not only of language and comedy but of feeling too' Sunday Times

Looks at the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow as a leading figure in the development of contemporary fiction, one whose work has, however, been challenged by more experimental, 'post-modern' developments in the novel. This book draws attention to Bellow's comedy, his sense of contemporary history and its stresses and anxieties.

The only full-length stage play by the acclaimed novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury