This incisive and skillfully articulated study explores the complex power relationships in John Fowles's fictions, particularly his handling of the pivotal subjects of art and sex. Chapters on The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower are included, and a final chapter discusses Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot.

In the spring of 1736 four men and one woman, all traveling under assumed names, are crossing the Devonshire countryside en route to a mysterious rendezvous. Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

A new trade paperback edition of "a masterpiece of symbolically charged realism....Fowles is the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James" (John Gardner, Saturday Review). The eponymous hero of John Fowles's largest and richest novel is an English playwright turned Hollywood screenwriter who has begun to question his own values. Summoned home to England to visit an ailing friend, Daniel Martin finds himself back in the company of people who once knew him well, forced to confront his buried past, and propelled toward a journey of self-discovery through which he ultimately creates for himself a more satisfying existence. A brilliantly imagined novel infused with a profound understanding of human nature, Daniel Martin is John Fowles at the height of his literary powers.

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. A journalist visits an elderly painter and becomes intrigued by his young female companions. Four years' worth of book research is set on fire in front of a writer. A successful MP disappears without a trace. Written with stylistic innovation, this sequence of novellas exploring the nature of art echoes the themes and preoccupations of Fowles' earlier work and cements his position as a master storyteller. 'Pick up any of these stories and you won't, as they say, be able to put it down' Financial Times

The history and meaning of Stonehenge with photographs of the ancient monument as it is today.

Although best known for his novels The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles is also a short story writer, a poet, a respected translator, and a prolific essayist. In his long literary career, he has managed the feats of welding stunning innovation to tradition, pushing the formal boundaries of literary fiction, and still capturing critical acclaim, popular success, and a worldwide readership. In Conversations with John Fowles, the first book of interviews devoted to the English writer, Dianne L. Vipond gathers over twenty of the most revealing interviews Fowles has granted in the last forty years. With critics, scholars, and journalists, he discusses his life, his art, his distinctive world view, and his special relationship with nature. Throughout his interviews, Fowles's remarkable consistency of thought is illuminated as he covers the meaning and genesis of his work. His uncompromising honesty and refreshing lack of guardedness are evident when he compares the naturalness of writing with eating or making love. From the 1960s through the 1990s, this master chronicler of the late half of the twentieth century reveals his serious engagement with social, political, and philosophical issues. He identifies himself with feminism, socialism, humanism, and the environmental movement, and he explores his recurring theme of personal, artistic, and socio-political freedom. His books, he says, "are about the difficulty of attaining personal freedom, especially in terms of discovering what one is." Any reader who has been intrigued, challenged, and entertained by his work in the past is sure to find these conversations spanning the writer's career to be stimulating and revealing. Dianne L. Vipond is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. A co- editor of the book Literacy, Language, and Power, she has published articles in English Journal, Short Story, Twentieth Century Literature, and the Los Angeles Times.