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Like a Fiery Elephant
In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known young novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde in both literature and film, he became famous -- not to say notorious -- both for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his idiosyncratic ways of putting them into practice. But in November 1973 Johnson's lifelong depression got the better of him, and he was found dead at his north London home. He had taken his own life at the age of forty. Jonathan Coe's biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind after his death, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best. As unconventional in form as one of its subject's own novels, it paints a remarkable picture -- sometimes hilarious, often overwhelmingly sad -- of a tortured personality; a man whose writing tragically failed to keep at bay the demons that pursued him.
The Unfortunates
A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match. B S Johnson’s famous ‘book in a box’, in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. The Unfortunates is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author.
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
Christie Malry is a simple man. As a young accounts clerk at a confectionery factory in London he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping. Frustrated by the petty injustices that beset his life – particularly those caused by the behaviour of authority figures – he determines a unique way to settle his grievances: a system of moral double-entry bookkeeping. So, for every offence society commits against him, Christie exacts recompense. ‘Every Debit must have its Credit, the First Golden Rule’ of the system. All accounts are to be settled, and they are – in the most alarming way. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the last novel to be published in B S Johnson's lifetime, is undoubtedly his funniest.
House Mother Normal
A wild, experimental, polyphonic novel, recounting a typical day of diminishing returns at a nursing home House Mother Normal, subtitled “A Geriatric Comedy,” is the English writer B. S. Johnson’s fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study of old age, stripped of sentimentality and spiked with bizarre language and perceptions. Made up of eight monologues describing a single day at a nursing home, House Mother Normal explores the failing minds of the elderly with precision, humor, and unflagging compassion, and Johnson achieves, with inventiveness and escalating absurdity, a vivid multidimensional effect.
Albert Angelo
Albert Angelo is by vocation an architect and only by economic necessity working as a substitute teacher. He had thought he was, if not dedicated, at least competent. But now, on temporary assignments in schools located in the tough neighborhoods of London, Albert feels ineffectual. He is failing as a teacher and failing to fulfill himself as an architect. And then, too, he is pained by the memory of a failed love affair.
Re-reading B. S. Johnson
Growing academic interest and the republication of B.S. Johnson's major works have been reinforced by Coe's award-winning biography Like A Fiery Elephant (2004). With a preface by Coe, this collection, co-edited by two leading Johnson scholars, offers an annotated bibliography, a chronology and readings of the author and his work.
Well Done God!
To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of his birth, two of the foremost scholars of B S Johnson, Professor Philip Tew and Dr Julia Jordan, have joined forces with Jonathan Coe, author of the prize-winning biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, to offer a selection of his greatest uncollected or unavailable writing. Well Done God! includes his major prose work, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, six plays and a selection of his remarkable journalism. B S Johnson is a truly unique British writer, a cult figure whose original and experimental fiction has, since his tragically early death in 1973, been rediscovered by many subsequent generations of writers and readers. In many ways the heir to Joyce and Beckett, Johnson played with form and narrative across many genres: novels, plays, poetry and memoir.
The B. S. Johnson - Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence
From 1959 to 1973, the writers B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose regularly wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their own work and literary preoccupations. They exchanged early drafts of poems, short stories, plays and novels, and their correspondence contains detailed comments and extended analyses of these texts, as well as illuminating reflections on literature, criticism, poetics and aesthetics. Though much of the correspondence is an extended literary discussion, it also contains moments of personal revelation, jokes and anecdotes so that the letters, with their surprising asides, are enjoyable to read, even as they inform with their biographical and intellectual content. ...
Travelling People
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Trawl
With an introduction by novelist Jon McGregor. The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship’s crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson’s finest novels. In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B S Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ and that he should write about ‘nothing else but what happens to me’, Johnson produced Trawl.
