The Black Prince

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101495685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Book Description
Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

The Bell

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101495669
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
A motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation in this early masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The Sea A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Black Prince

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099283999
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
The Black Prince is both a remarkable thriller and a story about being in love.Bradley Pearson, narrator and hero, is an elderly writer with a 'block'. Finding himself surrounded by predatory friends and relations - his ex-wife, her delinquent br

Henry And Cato

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407019937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
Henry and Cato is the story of two prodigal sons. Henry returns from a self-imposed exile in America to an unforeseen inheritance of wealth and land in England. He is also returning to his mother. His friend Cato is struggling with two ambiguous intermingled passions, one for a God who may or may not exist, the other for a petty criminal who may or may not be capable of salvation. Cato's father and his sister Colette wait anxiously to welcome Cato back to sanity after his dubious escapades. Henry meanwhile confronts his mother, the unappeased furies of childish resentment, and various possibilities of revenge. Henry's cool mother watches, Cato's impetuous sister intervenes. Can love here become a saving force, or is it condemned to be possessive and demonic? Blackmail and violence take a hand, and both Henry and Cato return home at last.

The Black Prince

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 178487518X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.' 'A source of wonders and delight' Spectator Ex-tax collector and author of two unpopular novels, Bradley Pearson wishes to devote his retirement to writing a masterpiece. But the doorbell and the phone keep ringing, and every ring brings with it an ex-wife, a friend in need, a sister in trouble or a young woman seeking a teacher, and so dusty, selfish Bradley is plunged into the muddles and mysteries which will end in his doom. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1973. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE HANNAH VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

The Black Prince (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 140902296X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CANDIA MCWILLIAM The Black Prince is both a remarkable thriller and a story about being in love. Bradley Pearson, narrator and hero, is an elderly writer with a 'block'. Finding himself surrounded by predatory friends and relations - his ex-wife, her delinquent brother, a younger, deplorably successful writer, Arnold Baffin, Baffin's restless wife and engaging daughter - Bradley attempts to escape. His failure to do so and its aftermath lead to a violent climax and a most unexpected conclusion.

The Sea, The Sea (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409043584
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
''I saw a monster rising from the waves.' **A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** **Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978** Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in - along with more recent lovers and friends - to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of 'learning to be good', Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSON VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine

Author: Rita Charon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199360197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine articulates the ideas, methods, and practices of narrative medicine. Written by the originators of the field, this book provides the authoritative starting place for any clinicians or scholars committed to learning of and eventually teaching or practicing narrative medicine.

Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch

Author: Julia Theresa Meszaros
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019876586X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, "selfless love" can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover's self. It proposes that while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self, both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing. Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Soren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.

Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel

Author: Lyra Ekström Lindbäck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350332925
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Lyra Ekström Lindbäck revisits the crucial distinction between literature and philosophy in Iris Murdoch's work to make a convincing case for understanding the particularity of literature and her insistence on the separation between the two. Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel makes a break with existing scholarship on Murdoch's philosophy and literature that ultimately re-states the philosophical value of literature, alongside literary aspects of philosophy. This book differs by deepening Murdoch's insistence on the differences between the disciplines, providing a consistent and polemical argument for the distinction between literature and philosophy more generally. Engaging thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Weil, and Cavell, Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel delves into the aesthetic characteristics that distinguish philosophy and literature. Through a discussion of the illusion of sense, the role of conceptual thinking in literature, the clash between epistemology and fiction, the artifice of tragedy, and the ambiguous morality of artistic inspiration and experience, this study reveals literature as essentially other to philosophy.