Search results for ""Author Willa Muir""

The Usurpers, Willa Muir's fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usupers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.

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This volume gathers together some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of her generation.Her writing is rich with paradox - although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented Scotland; although a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the 'poet's wife'; and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike. This collection is the first publication to offer a sense of the diversity of Willa Muir's oeuvre. It makes possible the re-evaluation of her work and assures her of a deserved place in the Scottish literary canon.

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The complete novels of one of the greatest German writers of all time, collected together in one literary masterpiece.Kafka’s characters are victims of forces beyond their control, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Filled with claustrophobic description and existential profundity, Kafka has been compared to a literary Woody Allen.In The Trial Joseph K is relentlessly hunted for a crime that remains nameless. The Castle follows K in his ceaseless attempts to enter the castle and to belong somewhere.In Amerika Karl Rossmann also finds himself isolated and confused when he is 'packed off to America by his parents'. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and 'America' is never quite as real as it seems. THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION BY WILLA AND EDWIN MUIR

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'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' Vladimir NabokovThe story of K. and his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his relentless, unavailing struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the castle that seems to rule it. K.'s isolation and perplexity, his begging for the approval of elusive and anonymous powers, epitomises Kafka's vision of twentieth-century alienation and anxiety.

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‘It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary’Rediscover Kafka's classic work of psychological horror. The Trial is the terrifying tale of Joseph K, a respectable functionary in a bank, who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. A nightmare vision of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the insanity of twentieth-century totalitarianism has resonated with readers for generations.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PHILLIPE SANDS

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