99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939- A Personal Choice [Hardcover]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Summit Books; 1ST edition (April 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671524070
• ISBN-13: 978-0671524074
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,449,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Burgess (25th February 1917-22nd November 1993) was one of the UK's leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, during his writing career Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction also includes NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 99 Novels, July 19, 2001

By 

Kevin Cooney (Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939- A Personal Choice (Hardcover)

I found this book in the early eighties, while living in New York. I loved Anthony Burgess for his erudition, his musical background, his love of Joyce, his brilliant, playful writing (Clockwork Orange) his knowledge of history and his ability to go on talk shows in the seventies and be smarter then anybody else but also completely down to earth. In the pages of 99 Novels are just those qualities.

This book -- a kind of "minute history" of literature since 1939 -- sent me scurrying into used book stores like a field mouse. His brief, paragraph long summaries of the "most influential" books since WW2 (starting with Finnegan's Wake) are provocative,funny, opinionated with a look to the long view as well. How broad was his taste? The Joyce scholar makes an argument for Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye as the best American Novel of the nineteen fifties. He also covers Norman Mailer, Brian Aldiss, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Ian Flemming, Orwell, Ballard, Huxley, Murdoch, Roth, Greene...etc.

In short, you can take this as a brilliant and unpretentious field guide from a writer who loved and knew literature and the English language quite unlike anybody else around. Burgess never lost sight of the fact that the novel is one of mankind's greatest inventions,and he proves it with this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short, pithy volume of idiosyncratic views on the English language novel since 1939, September 11, 2009

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (Paperback)

Burgess' book is valuable not because it is anything like an authoratative or comprehensive study of the English-language novel over the 2nd half of the 20th century -- but because it is a very personal glimpse at some of the ideas and stories that helped to shape one of the better novelists of the century, and because it is well-written and fun. He starts off with a nice introduction where he explains fairly clearly what a "novel" is to him, some of his aesthetic prejudices which lead him towards certain examples and away from others, and just enough of his personal history - years of being a book critic - to give you a sense as to why he undertook this project.

The author may limit himself to his own language, and mostly to the UK and USA, but he finds a wide number of genres and themes, picks lengthy series and very short works, books that are quite famous and others that are obscure and now hard to find. This is one of my favorite such books and I return to it often, though I confess I haven't yet read many of the books he covers. Some personal favorites of mine that are often ignored in such surveys are Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" and T.H. White's "The Once And Future King"; Burgess has more tolerance for fantasy, whimsy and fabulation than many of his contemporaries in the Ivory Tower and also includes such oddities as Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" and Keith Roberts' "Pavane."

Short and pithy paragraphs on each book - a bit more on longer and more difficult works like "Finnegans Wake" or the various novel-series like Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time". Enough, in other words, to incite interest but not too much to make the book lengthy or unwieldy in any way. In short, if you like Burgess at all - or even if you don't but want just some brief snippets on the English-language novel from WWII through the early 1980s, you could do worse. This also seems to be a significant influence on a couple of excellent genre surveys (fantasy, science fiction) by David Pringle.

Worth looking for.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Favorite, A Reading Project That Lasted For Years, February 10, 2011

By 

Michael P Mccullough "moik" (Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939- A Personal Choice (Hardcover)

I truly love this book. My favorite author has left us with a 100 book reading list of the best novels in English from 1939 (*Finnegans Wake*) and 1984 (because of *1984*, of course - which was published in 1949). I say 100 books because he leaves an empty space for one of his novels - I'd place *Earthly Powers* in that slot.

This list became a semi-obsessive project for me and so far I have read 77 out of 100 (or 76 out of 99). Its been a while since I read anything from the list. By reading this way I have discovered some absolutely wonderful novels I may have never read otherwise (and of course I have slogged through a couple of dogs as well) - it has been an enriching experience and I'd recommend it to anybody who loves 20th century literary fiction.