'I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language ... a very funny book' William S. Burroughs

Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence - he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's ninth. He and his gang of droogs rampage through a dystopian future, hunting for terrible thrills. But when Alex finds himself at the mercy of the state and subject to the ministrations of Dr Brodsky, and the mind-altering treatment of the Ludovico Technique, he discovers that fun is no longer the order of the day. The basis for Stanley Kubrick's notorious 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange is both a virtuoso performance from an electrifying prose stylist and a serious exploration of the morality of free will.

In his introduction, Blake Morrison situates A Clockwork Orange within the context of Anthony Burgess's many other works, explores the author's unhappiness with the Stanley Kubrick film version, analyses the composition of the Nadsat argot spoken by Alex and his droogs, and examines the influences on Burgess's unique, eternally original style.

With an Introduction by Blake Morrison

‘The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manqué: I make no other pretensions …’ Anthony Burgess

Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man’s Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess’s journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect.

The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable.

Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material.

'Like all good comic writers Mr Burgess lives his creations as much as he writes them. First class'
Observer

Anthony Burgess was an officer in the Colonial Service. In The Malayan Trilogy - Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East - he satirises the dog days of colonialism. Victor Crabbe is a well meaning, ineffectual English man in the tropics, keen to teach the Malays what the West can do for them. Through Crabbe's rise and fall and a series of wonderfully colourful characters, Burgess lays bare racial and social prejudices of post-war Malaya during the upheaval of Independence.

Who, I ask you, wants to drag his bones out of the earth, reclothed in flesh which, in some foul magic of reversal, is regurgitated by the worms, in order that his eyes may see God? Who, I ask you, wants to live for ever?
Sadoc son of Azor, a retired shipping clerk lying diseased and dying on the outreaches of the Roman Empire, sets down for future generations a tale of epic proportions: he is charged with recounting no less an event than the birth of Christianity. And what an account it is - the story of a religion of love, born into the cruelties of the kingdom of the wicked.
The Kingdom of the Wicked is one of Anthony Burgess's most ambitious novels. Its ancient setting, recreated in vivid and meticulous detail, is rendered new in this stunning account of the Roman Empire and its clashes with Christianity.

'One of the most productive, imaginative and risk-taking of writers... It is a clever, sexually explicit, fast-moving, full blooded yarn'
Irish Times

A Dead Man in Deptford re-imagines the riotous life and suspicious death of Christopher Marlowe. Poet, lover and spy, Marlowe must negotiate the pressures placed upon him by theatre, Queen and country. Burgess brings this dazzling figure to life and pungently evokes Elizabethan England.

From the acclaimed author of the dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is an inventive, thought-provoking and darkly absurd novel set in a work rampant with overpopulation.

The Wanting Seed is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics.

As governments struggle to maintain order in the face of overpopulation and food shortages and homosexuality is glorified in an attempt to further limit family sizes, Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna find themselves facing dire choices. Their world transforms into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger.

Tremor of Intent

Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel, by Anthony Burgess, is an English espionage novel. Burgess conceived it as a reaction both to the heavy-handed and humourless spy fiction of John le Carré, and to Ian Fleming's James Bond, a character Burgess thought an imperialist relic.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel.

Napoleon Symphony

Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements is Anthony Burgess's fictional recreation of the life and world of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its four "movements" follow the structure of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, known as the Eroica. Burgess said he found the novel "elephantine fun" to write.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness mark every page.