PETER OWEN

(P/B) POPE JOAN

(H/B) SILENCE
A special hardback edition of Shusaku Endo's masterpiece Silence to mark the release of Martin Scorsese's screen adaptation starring Liam Neeson, Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield. In 1637 two Portuguese missionaries undertake a perilous search for their tutor missing on the hostile island of Japan. If discovered, they face the same fate as other practising Christians - torture at the hands of the Shogun and his Samurai, until they renounce their Christian faith. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) WONDERFUL FOOL
Gaston Bonaparte, a young Frenchman, visits Tokyo to stay with his pen-friend Takamori. His appearance is a bitter disappointment to his new friends and his behaviour causes them acute embarrassment. He is a trusting person with a simple love for others and continues to trust even after they have demonstrated deceit and betrayal. He spends his time not sightseeing but making friends with street children, stray dogs, prostitutes and gangsters. Endo charts his misadventures with sharp irony, satire and objectivity. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) PARIS FRANCE
Gertrude Stein lived in Paris from 1903. With her brother Leo she acted as patron for a number of soon-to-be famous artists, most notably Pablo Picasso. Published in 1940, on the day that Paris fell to the Germans, Paris France blends Stein's childhood memories of Paris with trenchant observations about everything French. It is a witty fricass?e of food and fashion, pets and painters, musicians, friends and artists, served up with a healthy garnish of Steinien humour and self-indulgence. For readers who have previously considered Gertrude ...
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(P/B) THE POLITICAL PRISONER
The Political Prisoner has its autobiographical roots in Pavese's own arrest and imprisonment in Calabria for his writings in the anti-fascist magazine La Cultura. This story describes the day to day life of Stefano, an anti-fascist who has served a prison sentence and is banished to a remote southern Italian seaside resort where he awaits an official pardon. Pavese describes the monotony, the grimness and the sensuality of life in the village through the eyes of a man who realises his habits have been broken. When the summer ends Stefano ...
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(P/B) HIDDEN FACES
In Hidden Faces, the only novel by Salvador Dal?, the reader enters the bizarre world already familiar to us from his paintings. Dal? describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists, from the February riots of 1934 in Paris to the closing days of the Second World War, constitutes a brilliant and dramatic vehicle for Dal?'s vision and re...
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(P/B) THE ANTICHRIST
While the rest of Joseph Roth's oeuvre has been made available to the English-speaking world in recent years, this new translation by Richard Panchyk - a distant relative of Roth - will redress the historical absence of such a key, neglected work in the Roth canon. Roth penned and published The Antichrist during the first years of his exile from his homeland, and an English translation was published in London, in 1935 by William Heinemann. The Antichrist's singularity amongst Joseph Roth's work stems both from the urgency that courses thro...
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(P/B) SCANDAL
Suguro is an eminent Catholic novelist, about to receive a major literary award. So when a drunk woman he has never met before approaches him at the award ceremony, claiming she knows him well from his regular visits to Tokyo's red-light district, she must surely be mistaken? But with a scurrilous press campaign damaging Suguro's reputation, his sleazy doppelganger appears more and more, as if deliberately trying to discredit him. He is sighted touring the love hotels and brothels of Shinjuku; a leering portrait of him appears in an exhibi...
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(P/B) THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD
‘Walking up a mountain track, I fell to thinking. Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.’ - Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World. Opening with the most famous introductory lines in Japanese literature, The Three Cornered World has been cherished by generations of readers as a glittering jewel in the crown of S...
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(P/B) CONFESSIONS OF A MASK
This autobiographical novel, regarded as Mishima's finest book, is the haunting story of a Japanese boy's development toward a homosexual identity during and after the Second World War. Detailing his progress from an isolated childhood through adolescence to manhood, including an abortive love affair with a classmate's sister, it reports the inner life of a boy's preoccupation with death. This fourth reprint attests to the power of the novel's enduring themes of fantasy, despair and alienation. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND
Narcissus is a teacher at Mariabronn, a monastery in medieval Germany, and Goldmund his favourite pupil. While Narcissus remains detached from the world in prayer and meditation, Goldmund runs away from the monstery in pursuit of love. Thereafter he lives a picaresque wanderer's life, his amatory adventures resulting in pain as well as ecstasy. His eventual reunion with Narcissus brings into focus the diversity between artist and thinker, Dionysian and Apollonian. This new edition features a foreword from the musician and artist Graham Cox...
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(P/B) THE DEMANDING DEAD
With eight outstanding ghost stories by one of the finest writers in the genre, The Demanding Dead is an absorbing collection of tales from Edith Wharton's fertile imagination. Like her mentor Henry James, Wharton had the ability to switch genres seemingly without effort.The Demanding Dead highlights a lesser-known side of Wharton's writing. The same literary genius evident in her famous works such as The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth is here dedicated to giving the reader a damned good scare. Stories such as 'Kerfol...
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(P/B) THE SILENT PROPHET
The Silent Prophet is the result of Joseph Roth's visit to Moscow in 1926 when speculation about the fate of Trotsky was rife. Roth refered to this work as his 'Trotsky novel', but the experiences of the book's hero, the Trotsky-like Friederich Kargan, are as recognisably those of a less well-known Jewish outsider, a perpetual exile searching for a place in the new Europe and a set of values to counter his own scepticism and growing disallusionment - Joseph Roth himself. Because he is born illegitimate, Friederich Kargan lacks even a socia...
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(P/B) SILENCE
Silence is the most important novel of the acclaimed Japanese author Shusaku Endo. It caused a major controversy in Japan following its publication in 1967. A Japanese Catholic, Endo tells the story of two seventeenth-century missionaries attempting to shore up the oppressed Japanese Christian movement. Father Rodrigues has come to Japan to find the truth behind unthinkable rumours that his famous teacher Ferreira has renounced his faith. But after his arrival he discovers that the only way to help the brutally persecuted Christians may be...
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(P/B) CHAGALL: MY LIFE
Marc Chagall's strange autobiographical essay on his early life has established itself as a unique document in twentieth-century literature. Completed by the artist in 1922, this memoir was not available in English until Peter Owen published this translation in 1965, and it has remained in print ever since. Lyrical and evocative, it is a key work in Chagall studies for the light it throws on the shaping of the artist's creative genius. His deep roots in Jewish tradition - religious and secular - are reflected in these recollections of his ...
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(P/B) DEMIAN
Published shortly after the First World War, Demian is considered to be one of Hermann Hesse's finest novels. Emil Sinclair boasts of a theft that he has not committed and subsequently finds himself blackmailed by a bully. He turns to Max Demian, in whom he finds a friend and spiritual mentor. This strangely self-possessed figure is able to lure him out of his ordinary home-life and convince him of an existing alternative world of corruption and evil. He progressing from an orthodox education through to philosophical mysticism, Emil's sear...
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(P/B) THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Edith Piaf's life is almost as famous as her work. With the fortieth anniversary of her death currently being celebrated with a major retrospective in Paris, Piaf-mania is at an all-time high. Peter Owen has again acquired the rights to the official autobiography of the singer. Our previous Piaf book, My Life, which is now unavailable, recently completely sold out a second print run. From her birth (in the Parisian streets, her mother shielded by two gendarmes) to her death (when her husband allegedly drove her corpse from the hospital whe...
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(P/B) SECOND NATURE
The life of Boris Pasternak culminated in the publication of his successful novel Doctor Zhivago, and his being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, an award he did not accept. In this collected volume of Pasternak's poetry Andrei Navrozov seeks to transport the English-language reader into the Russian poet's mysterious lyric universe. Both inventive and exact, the poems in Second Nature are inspired by life and scenery from the natural world. Unavailable for some time, Second Nature has been acclaimed by leading Pasternak scholars...
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(P/B) IMMORAL MEMORIES
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), creator of such masterpieces as Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, was perhaps the greatest of all film directors. He wrote his autobiography in 1946, two years before his death, and it is a work of major importance in the light it sheds on his personality and mercurial genius. Vivid, eccentric and free-ranging, Immoral Memories is written in a style reminiscent of the brilliant visual effects of montage and dynamic progression that characterize its author's film-making technique. He...
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(P/B) WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
Weights and Measures was the third Roth novel to be translated into English and one of the last he wrote, as he drank himself to death in unhappy exile in France. It is a fable about the disintegration of a good man. At the insistence of his wife, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army for a civilian job as the Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. Attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties he is at a loss in a world of smugglers, profiteer...
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