Urgent Copy: Literary Studies by Anthony Burgess [FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING] 1968 • Norton

Urgent Copy: Literary Studies by Anthony Burgess 

FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [1968] W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Hardcover with dust jacket in very good condition.

*Clean, shiny, ex-library copy with a few defects.

Dust jacket is very attractive; clean and lustrous with a small catalog sticker on spine.

Panels have been trimmed short with some adhesive residue visible along edges.  Otherwise excellent.  Now housed in a new HQ jacket protector.

Book is very good.  Cloth boards are sharp and clean with just a few tiny spots of discoloration.   All library materials have been removed for a clean presentation. 

Pages are clean, unmarked and read as new with just a *stamp on title page.

Anthony Burgess is, above all, one of the most talented and formidably prolific  novelists of our day. Although he regards criticism as a secondary activity, he is also one of our most perceptive, authoritative, and influential literary critics. Urgent Copy is his personal selection of the best of his literary criticism over the past six years. It reflects the amazingly wide range of his interests: from Elizabethan poetry to the contemporary American novel, from Dickens to McLuhan. As a scholar, he vividly illuminates and contributes to the subject under discussion; as a professional novelist, he brings to fiction reviewing a sensitive and generous appreciation of style, craft, and intellectual content.

As the title of this collection candidly implies, these essays were written to meet a deadline, and they are generally short, specifically tailored to the space requirements of a Sunday newspaper or a weekly periodical. But the speed and conciseness demanded of Burgess in these essays have not impaired his intellectual scope, his acumen as a critic, or the flair and flavor of his prose.