Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141196335 ISBN 13: 9780141196336

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2012

The cult favorite absurdist comedy by a writer who inspired Wilde, Forster, and Waugh

The fairly young and entirely alive Mrs. Shamefoot wants nothing more than to have a memorial stained-glass window installed in her honor in an English cathedral. From this premise, the inimitable Ronald Firbank extends his witty, eccentric Vainglory, with a crowded cast of hilariously drawn characters—Winsome Brooks, Lady Anne Pantry, Miss Wookie, Mrs. Barrow of Dawn, and Mrs. Steeple, among others—a riot of parties, and a bottomless sense of the ridiculous. Firbank's fine comic skill, quick-fire dialogue, and descriptive flights of fancy are perfectly captured inVainglory, his first and longest novel, as well as in two novellas included here, Inclinations and Caprice.

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.

About the Author:

Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) wrote Valmouth, The Princess Zabaroff, The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, among other works.

Richard Canning has edited several anthologies of gay fiction and was the recipient of the 2005 Editors Choice Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Review:

Ronald Firbank is one of the funniest writers in English and Richard Canning's introduction makes him entirely accessible for a new generation of readers -- Edmund White Elusive, rich, and now and again comically improper Guardian Deliciously influential -- Philip Womack Telegraph These three early novels should be welcomed with a bacchanal of the sort that you might find within their pages. Published between 1915 and 1917, they display a brittle, beautiful sensibility [...] Without Ronald Firbank we would not have Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh or Henry Green. His ultimate descendant is William Burroughs [...] This reissue is a reminder of what can be done with words, and may it reach a whole new generation of readers. Time to break open the champagne. Observer As Richard Canning notes in his introduction to this authoritative new edition, Ronald Firbank is our great unsung modernist...These novels reveal subtler and more surprising pleasures with each reading. Yes, there is frivolity here, but there is also heartbreak and an almost ruthless refusal to prettify the rawest and most elemental aspects of human experience -- David Leavitt A person who dislikes [Firbank's novels] may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality but I do not wish ever to see him again -- W H Auden