Back Cover:

Anthony Burgess Invites You to Consider: What Are the Best Novels of Our Time?

       In this provocative and engaging book, internationally celebrated novelist and critic Anthony Burgess offers his list of the best 99 novels published in English since 1939 on both sides of the Atlantic and in the rest of the English-speaking world. Looking back over the past forty-five years -- a period that encompasses the start of a world war and ends with the nonfulfillment of Orwell's nightmare -- Burgess considers: How far have our novels reflected the period accurately? How far have they opened our eyes to the future? How much entertainment have they given? For each novelist and novel on his list -- and the range is wide, catholic, and full of surprises -- Anthony Burgess provides a cogent and impassioned argument. "In my time," he writes in his introduction, "I have read a lot of novels in the way of duty; I have read a great number for pleasure as well. I am, I think, qualified to compile a list like the one that awaits you in the pages inside. The 99 novels I have chosen, I have chosen with some, though not with total, confidence. I have concentrated on works which have brought something new -- in technique or view of the world -- to the form. . ."

       Creating a storm of controversy both here and in England for what has been included (Ian Flemming's Goldfinger) as well as neglected (Nabokov's Lolita, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom; there is nothing by Cheever, Le Carre, Capote, or Vonnegut), 99 Novels has been praised by The Washington Post as "a book that almost anyone interested in modern fiction will want to look at."

       Anthony Burgess is perhaps best known in this country as the author of A Clockwork Orange. He is the author of twenty-six novels, eleven books of literary criticism, two children's books, and five translations. Burgess is also a notable composer.

CONTENTS:

Introduction

1939   1940   1941   1944   1945  1946   1947   1948   1949   1950   

1951   1952   1953   1954   1957   1958   1959   1960   1961   1962   

1963   1964   1965   1966   1967   1968   1969   1970   1973   1975   

1976   1977   1978   1979   1980   1981   1982   1983

Bibliography 

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