Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century's Most Enjoyable Books

(, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Pure Pleasure gives us fifty of the most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, chosen on a single principle - the pleasure they inspire.In his selection, John Carey, one of Britain's most respected literary critics, has mixed fiction, non-fiction and poetry, heavyweight authors and popular classics, and taken in French, German, Russian, Czech an American books as well as English. He has mostly avoided 'thumping masterpieces' in favour of overlooked gems which show the century's great authors in a new light.A triumph of witty and fast-moving literary criticism, Pure Pleasure is an idiosyncratic antidote to the 'definitive' lists of twentieth-century classics. First published weekly in The Sunday Times as 'John Carey's Books of the Century', the essays generated intense reader interest, and this collection includes a discussion of the letters of applause, outrage, debate and dissent they provoked.

Author Bio

John Carey is Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, a distinguished critic, reviewer and broadcaster, and the author of several books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, and most recently, Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books, described, by James Wood in the London Review of Books, as 'likeable, wise and often right . . . one feels an attractive sense of partisanship in Carey's writing, an alliance with the ordinary, the plain spoken, the unlettered, the sympathetic and the humane. Carey writes with an Orwellian attention to decency'. He is a regular critic on BBC2's Newsnight Review. He is also the editor of the best-selling anthologies The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias.