Keenly observed autobiographical fiction and journal entries from acclaimed writer Denton Welch, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs “In Youth Is Pleasure” recounts the summer vacation of Orvil Pym—a sensitive, withdrawn, and deeply unhappy boy of fifteen. Following a trying year at public school, Orvil spends the summer with his father and two older brothers. The quotidian events of a seemingly ordinary summer are rendered dazzling by the intensity of adolescence and Welch’s gift for human observation. First published in 1945, “In Youth Is Pleasure” is based closely on Welch’s own adolescent experiences of solitude and introspection. This volume also includes “I Left My Grandfather’s House,” an unforgettable account of a walking tour through the British countryside. These two works feature Welch at his autobiographical best.

A beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel. Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen, and the novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school. As in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of Orville's surroundings, as reflected through his remarkable perception. Includes a foreword by William Burroughs, who said of Welch's work 'It is time Denton received the attention he deserves.'

In Literary/Liberal Entanglements, Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson bring together ten essays by scholars from a wide range of fields in English studies in order to interrogate the complex, entangled relationship between the history of literature and the history of liberalism. The volume has three goals: to investigate important episodes in the entanglement of literary history and liberalism; to analyze the impact of this entanglement on the secular and democratic projects of modernity; and thereby to reassess the dynamics of our neoliberal present. The volume is organized into a series of paired essays, with each pair investigating a concept central to both literature and liberalism: acting, socializing, discriminating, recounting, and culturing. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the vivid capacity of literary study writ large to reckon with, imagine, and materialize durative accounts of history and politics. Literary/Liberal Entanglements models a method of literary history for the twenty-first century.

Maiden Voyage is Denton Welch's debut novel, a frankly autobiographical account of a short period in his life when - at the age of 16 - he ran away from his English boarding school, before being sent back to Shanghai to live with his businessman father. "Trembling with sex", is how Alan Bennett wonderfully describes Maiden Voyage; and as well as portraying so acutely the passions and nameless longings of a teenage boy, and the strange quirks and brutalities of public school life, it is also a novel that deals with the agony of childhood bereavement - the suffering of a boy who has only recently lost his mother. When Maiden Voyage was first published in 1943 it was an overnight sensation, and so graphic in its depiction of adolescence and the schooling system that Welch's publisher - Herbert Read - was forced to seek legal advice. Seventy years on, there is little to shock the modern reader - but more than enough to earn a new generation of fans and admirers. William Burroughs said, "If ever there was a writer who was neglected, it was Denton. He makes you aware of the magic that is right beneath your eyes."

An expanded edition of the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground—with the first biography of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound. This newly expanded edition of England's Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands’ personal archives. Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. Over four decades, the three intertwined groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy, relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their music, beliefs, and practices have repelled them from it. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Joe Orton, Shirley Collins, Björk, and Marc Almond. The story of this Hidden Reverse has, necessarily, remained a secret. Until now. This new volume contains almost 100 pages of extra material culled from Furfur, a collection of interviews with musicians and artists whose careers intersected with the bands’, initially published alongside Strange Attractor's first limited edition of the book.

The first volume of Denton Welch’s complete collected short works English novelist Denton Welch originally trained as a visual artist, and a painterly perspicacity and talent for human observation are evident in his writing. His close attention to detail renders even the most seemingly mundane trivialities memorable and important. Though he died at the young age of thirty-three, Welch was quite prolific, doing most of his writing while bedridden after a bicycling accident that left him seriously injured. He produced three novels, over seventy-five short stories, and a journal that ran over two hundred fifty thousand words long. Included in this volume are autobiographical works inspired by Welch’s youth in China, such as “I Can Remember” and “The Coffin on the Hill.” “I First Began to Write” is a brief vignette detailing Welch’s early efforts as an author. These stories, fragments, and poems reveal a writer gifted with superb powers of description.