"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry....

In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire-Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie-have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism.

Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar-a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of...

A strange and delightful memento of one of the most lasting literary voices of all time, The Daily Henry James is a little book from a great mind. First published with James's approval in 1911 as the ultimate token of fandom--a limited edition quote-of-the-day collection titled The Henry James Year Book--this new edition is a gift across time, arriving as we mark the centenary of his death. Drawing on the Master's novels, essays, reviews, plays, criticism, and travelogues, The Daily Henry James offers a series of impressions (for if not of impressions, of what was James...

"Contemporary Reception," new to the Third Edition, considers the broad range of reactions to Faulkner's extraordinary novel on publication. Michael Gorra's headnote sets the stage for assessments by Evelyn Scott, Henry Nash Smith, Clifton P. Fadiman, Dudley Fitts, Richard Hughes, and Edward Crickmay. New materials by Faulkner ("The Writer and His Work") include letters to Malcolm Cowley aboutThe Portable Faulkner and Faulkner's Nobel Prize for Literature address. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" begins with Michael Gorra's insightful headnote, which is followed by seven seminal...

'So far as the young were concerned, ' Orwell wrote of Britain in the years after the Great War, 'the official beliefs were dissolving like sandcastles.' Most critical accounts of that postwar generation have been constrained by having to deal with the myth of the 'thirties.' Michael Gorra's innovation in this exciting study of the postwar generation's major novelists lies in seeing the consequences of that dissolution in formal rather than political terms, arguing that the novelist's difficulty in representing human character in what Wyndham Lewis called a 'shell-shocked' age is itself a...

"Michael Gorra's wise and worldly new critical edition of James's first masterpiece will help readers of all persuasions appreciate The Portrait of a Lady as a brilliant experiment in the art of the novel; as a landmark in the emergence of American literature; and as an open-ended, quietly terrifying meditation on American identity in its encounter with the world." --Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University