In this new selection from the poetry of Lawrence Durrell (the first for thirty years), Peter Porter has drawn on the full range of the published work, from A Private Country (1943) to Vega (1973), and has provided a long overdue revaluation of Durrell's poetic career. In his detailed and generous introduction, Porter makes the case for A Private Country as one of the most accomplished debut collections of the twentieth century, and traces Durrell's preoccupations and poetic personality within the wider scene. The selection of poems makes its own strong case for the continuing power and originality of this attractive, metropolitan and wholly individual body of work.

From the olive trees of southern France to Gnostic cults in Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in this first volume of a great literary adventure. For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie’s descent into madness and Piers’s suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers’s affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s entire poetic opus, from his early collections in the 1940s up to his last one published in 1973. Thirty years of Durrellian poetry are brought together in order to unveil the genesis of Durrell’s writing, both poetic and fictional, drawing links to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. Durrell thus appears as first and foremost one of the greatest late modernist poets whose literary and epistemological investigations are to be understood in the light of a worldwide network of literary brotherhoods including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book shows why Durrell must also be read as the heir to the greatest English romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth) as well as to the French symbolists and modernists (from Baudelaire to Nerval, Valéry, and Cendrars).This comparative approach opens up a brand new perspective on Durrell that has not yet been broached by North American and English scholarship. The symbolic patterns, the stylistic ploys, and the aesthetic and philosophic tenets that characterize Durrell’s poetics account for the necessary back-and-forth reading that connects prose and poetry, the fictional and the lyrical, the descriptive and the abstract. Poetry excerpts, extracts from his residence books, novels, and essays highlight not only Durrell’s complex literary strategies but also the ontological quest of a writer who, although never at home with the world he lived in, strove to create a life-world, what semiologists call the “Umwelt.”

The prize-winning biography of the celebrated author of the Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet: an “elegant and meticulous . . . treat” (Kirkus Reviews). A New York Times Notable Book Born in colonial India in 1912, Lawrence Durrell established his literary reputation as a citizen of the Mediterranean. After attending school in England, Durrell escaped the country he dubbed “Pudding Island” for the Greek island of Corfu, only to make another escape—this time from Nazi invasion—to Egypt. His experiences in wartime Alexandria led to a quartet of novels, beginning with Justine, that are collectively considered some of the great masterpieces of postwar fiction. Durrell’s peripatetic life, which eventually took him to the South of France, fed his work with the richness and drama of his various adoptive homes. A man of protean talents, Durrell is celebrated for his fiction and poetry, as well has his highly regarded translations, essays, and travel literature. In researching this authorized biography, Ian S. MacNiven traveled over a period of twenty years from India to California, interviewing hundreds of individuals and visiting all but one of the many places Durrell lived. The result is an intimate portrait of a literary titan that was awarded a prize by the French city of Antibes for the year’s best study on Durrell.

DIVDIVWho will survive the Labyrinth of Crete?/divDIV /divDIVA group of English cruise-ship tourists debark to visit the isle of Crete’s famed labyrinth, the City in the Rock. The motley gathering includes a painter, a poet, a soldier, an elderly married couple, a medium, a convalescent girl, and the mysterious Lord Gracean. The group is prepared for a trifling day of sightseeing and maybe even a glimpse of the legendary Minotaur, but instead is suddenly stuck in a nightmare when a rockslide traps them deep within the labyrinth. Who among the passengers will make it out alive? And for those who emerge, will anything ever be the same?/div/div

In Bitter Lemons, Durrell tells the perceptive, often humorous, story of his experiences on Cyprus between 1953 and 1956-first as a visitor, then as a householder and teacher, and finally as Press Advisor to a government coping with armed rebellion. Here are unforgettable pictures of the sunlit villages and people, the ancient buildings, mountains and sea-and the somber political tragedy that finally engulfed the island.