Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings - Hardcover

Fowles, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805058672 ISBN 13: 9780805058673

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

A collection of the virtuoso nonfiction writings by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

As a novelist, John Fowles needs no introduction. His popularity and his place in the English literary canon have been assured for several decades. His novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman became instant classics upon publication. But his nonfiction writings are less well known, in part because their appearance has been scattered in ephemeral periodicals, academic journals, or as forewords or introductions to other authors' work. Wormholes is the first representative gathering of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings.

Wormholes is divided into four sections--Writing and the Self, Culture and Society, Literature and Literary Criticism, and Nature and the Nature of Nature; these thirty pieces, dating from 1963 to the present, range in length from a single page to substantial essays. Wormholes is a reflection of the writer's developing views on the art of fiction and on the relationship of literature to life and morality throughout the mature, fertile period of his career. Not only is it a rich mine of essays as art, it is also geography of the mind of one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

John Fowles's many books include The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot. He lives in England.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The celebrated English novelist gathers his essays of four decades in one volume. Best known for his novels, which include classic works such as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles now offers a collection of essays and ``occasional pieces'' written between 1963 and 1997. The book comprises 30 disparate pieces, divided into four categories: ``Autobiographical,'' ``Culture and Society,'' ``Literature and Literary Criticism,'' and ``Nature and the Nature of Nature.'' Fowles enthusiasts will be grateful for the book. The master's ruminations will deepen their understanding of his fictional world, perhaps especially the section on nature. However, those not already in thrall to Fowles's imagination are not likely to be persuaded or even attracted by this omnium-gatherum of odds and ends. Curiously, Fowles seems uneasy as an essayist. It is, for example, a leitmotif of this volume for him to declare that he does not care what ``the academics'' think. He claims this so often that it becomes clear that ``the academics''whoever they may bebother him a great deal and that he in fact does care what they think. This unnecessary combat with phantoms makes him appear defensive and unsure of himself. Consequently it undermines his reader's confidence in the surefootedness of his critical stance. He is at his best when completely unapologetic, as in comments of this sort: ``Above all I loathe the drift (a kind of fascism of the majority) that would so homogenize, suburbanize, and `democratize' life as to make it lose all it varieties and roughnessesmake it, like margarine, `easy to spread. '' Take that to Starbucks and sip it. In the end, though shot through with veins of gold, this collection also contains its share of slag and dross. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805058672
• ISBN 13: 9780805058673
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432