John Carey

Puro Placer contiene una selección de los cincuenta libros más recomendables del siglo XX, que han sido elegidos atendiendo a un único principio: el placer que inspiran. En esta recopilación de textos britanicos, franceses, alemanes, rusos, checos y americanos, John Carey (uno de los criticos literarios mas respetados del Reino Unido) combina ficcion, no ficcion y poesia y autores solemnes con clasicos populares. El autor ha evitado las grandes obras canonicas en favor de otras joyas emblematicas no tan conocidas que ofrecen una nueva percepcion de los grandes autores del pasado siglo. En la tarea de desempolvar estos tesoros nos desvela como surgieron y como se escribieron, a la vez que los situa en su contexto general.

En el momento de la publicación en inglés de esta obra la arremetida de John Carey contra los fundadores de la cultura moderna causó consternación entre los círculos influyentes del arte y la universidad. El profesor Carey nos muestra cómo veían los intelectuales de comienzos del siglo XX a las masas: como enjambres semihumanos narcotizados por la prensa popular y el cine y a punto para su exterminio. Al poner de manifiesto la repulsión que la gente corriente provocaba en George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats y otros autores canonizados, John Carey relaciona esa actitud con el culto al superhombre nietzscheano, que halló en Hitler su plasmación definitiva. Los cuatro primeros capítulos del presente libro se basan en las T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures que pronunció en 1989, unas conferencias organizadas por la Universidad de Kent.

¿El arte nos hace mejores personas? ¿Tiene mayor valor el arte "elevado" que el de masas? ¿Qué credibilidad poseen los juicios artísticos? A estas y a otras muchas preguntas responde John Carey con grandes dosis de escepticismo y acerada inteligencia. El reputado critico britanico nos ofrece una vision personal, ironica y llena de erudiccion acerca del valor real del arte, su funcion social y su relacion con el ser humano.

Esta nueva edición de Genética médica mantiene el formato y la presentación de ediciones anteriores. Introduce al estudiante en los principios básicos de la biología molecular, que son comentados y a

An exploration of the strange poetry of Dickenss imagination by leading academic and critic John Carey.Setting aside the usual interpretations of Dickenss work, A Violent Effigy delves into the wonderful, terrible fantasy world it inhabited. It shows Dickens torn between the appeal of violence and a fanatical orderliness: he was attracted by characters who commit murder or burst into flame or want to eat one another, but also required people soaped and regimented. The children he created were either the pious gnomes beloved of Victorian readers or callous, sharp-nosed children who pick out adults by the odd personal atmospheres they carry around. Among his females are mythic women whose insidious miniature weapons - needles, scissors - threaten the dominant male. He created a shadow-land between life and death, peopled by effigies, walking coffins, waxworks, stuffed creatures and disturbingly animated corpses. John Carey skilfully shows how Dickens demolished Victorian shams, while keeping at bay the terrors of his fantasy. He celebrates, above all, Dickens peculiar genius for renewing the world by the curious lights he saw in it.

Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the masses as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler.Careys assault on the founders of modern culture caused consternation throughout the artistic and academic establishments when it was first published in 1992.

***FEATURED ON BBC 2s BETWEEN THE COVERS WITH SARA COX***The Faber Book of Reportage is John Careys remarkable collection of eyewitness accounts that draws on the voices and emotions of the people who experienced some of historys most memorable events.Stunning . . . There are descriptions in this book so fresh that they sear themselves into the imagination.JEREMY PAXMANFascinating - theres funny stuff, interesting stuff, loads of brilliant stuff really.JO BRAND (on BBC 2s Between the Covers)What was it like to be caught in the firestorm that destroyed Pompeii? To have dinner with Attila the Hun? To watch the charge of the Light Brigade? To see the Titanic slide beneath the waves? John Careys best-selling Faber Book of Reportage draws its eyewitness account from memoirs, travel books and newspapers. This is history with the varnish removed.

From one of the countrys most eminent reviewers and academics, a delightfully sceptical and devastatingly intelligent assessment of the true value of art.

The Faber Book of Science introduces hunting spiders and black holes, gorillas and stardust, protons, photons and neutrinos. In his acclaimed anthology, John Carey plots the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to Chaos Theory. The emphasis is on the scientists themselves and their own accounts of their breakthroughs and achievements. The classic science-writers are included - Darwin, T.H. Huxley and Jean Henri Fabre tracking insects through the Provencal countryside. So too are todays experts - Steve Jones on the Human Genome Project, Richard Dawkins on DNA and many other representatives of the contemporary genre of popular science-writing which, John Carey argues, challenges modern poetry and fiction in its imaginative power.

A new approach to Thackeray. Although this study embraces all his work, it switches attention from his late novels, and bases the case for his imaginative vitality on the multifarious material - reviews, travel books, burlesques, Punch articles - that he turned out, mostly under severe financial stress, at the start of his writing career. Here was the breeding ground of Vanity Fair; here we find the subversive Thackeray, foe of humbug and high art, waylaying snobbery and the cant of social reformers with bravura and buffoonery - the Thackeray who, in Trollopes words, laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. In portraying the range and intensity of Thackerays imagination, topics singled out include: light and painting; ballet dancers; pantomime; haute cuisine; times ruins; and the rainbow realm of commerce. The picture of Thackeray, as man and artist, that emerges, is fresh and challenging.

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxfords oldest English Literature professorship.He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.

Donne is perhaps the most intellectual of English poets, and John Carey is perhaps the most intelligent of contemporary English literary critics. The encounter, as one might expect, is fierce and enthralling... This book is sensitive, searching, powerful, exciting, provocative and witty. It is a superb achievement. Christopher Hill, TLSJohn Donne: Life, Mind and Art is a unique attempt to see Donne whole. Beginning with an account of his life, it takes as its domain not only the whole range of the poetry, but also the sermons, the letters, the spiritual and controversial works, and such highly personal documents as the treatise on suicide. The result is a clearer picture than has hitherto emerged of one of the most intricate and compelling of literary personalities.The one book we have needed all along... A magnificent exercise in reappraisal. I have never read a critical work which reaches as deeply inside the mind of its subject. Jonathan Raban, Sunday TimesCareys book is itself alive with the kind of energy it attributes to Donne. Christopher Ricks, London Review of Books

William Golding was born in 1911 and educated at his local grammar school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a volume of poems in 1934 and during the war served in the Royal Navy. Afterwards he returned to being a schoolmaster in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was an immediate success, and was followed by a series of remarkable novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and was knighted in 1988. He died in 1993.

After its publication in 1667, John Miltons Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit. Now it is little read. To bring readers back to Miltons masterpiece, John Carey has shortened it to a third of its original length. In this fascinating reinterpretation, Carey reveals new insights about Miltons sources of inspiration, while exploring divided readings of the works key characters. The Essential Paradise Lost presents the epics greatest poetry, with linking passages that preserve its cosmic sweep - from the superhuman defiance of a ruined archangel to a pair of tragic lovers, bewildered to find themselves responsible for the fate of the whole human race.