Best known for his play Noises Off, Michael Frayn has garnered widespread critical acclaim and a number of literary honors for his work as a journalist, playwright, novelist, philosopher, and translator. Published in 2002, his novel Spies won the Booker Prize and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize, and he presides as his generation's foremost translator of Anton Chekhov. In this comprehensive assessment of Frayn's varied body of work, Merritt Moseley introduces readers to the accomplishments of one of Britain's most versatile writers. Beginning with Frayn's humorous journalism, which...

Novelist, playwright, teleplaywright, and literary critic, David Lodge ranks as one of English literature's most overlooked and under-appreciated writers of modern fiction. In this new critique, Merritt Moseley examines the many facets of Lodge the man and Lodge the writer, his Catholic and University education, his origins in England's literary rebirth of the 1950s, and his unique ability for fictive change.

Understanding Julian Barnes surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes's distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes's greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes's fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue...