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Visit www.penguin.co.uk
or www.fsgbooks.com
for more information or to order.
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William Blake -- Selected Poems
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James Fenton has edited a new
edition of William Blake's poems for Faber and Faber. To purchase
the collection, please visit the publisher's website at www.faber.co.uk.
It is also available from Amazon.co.uk.
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Ian McEwan on James Fenton
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"There is a strong case to be made that James Fenton is the
finest poet writing in English. His technical virtuosity is beyond
doubt; his long experience as war correspondent, journalist and
traveller has given him an unmatched range of subject matter -
war and revolution, the dementia of collective passions, reflections
on fate, and love - he has written some of the most beautiful
love poems of our times. He is a poet of great emotional depth
and wisdom. Increasingly, his work has a strong connection with
song. He also has a taste for light verse of exquisite charm and
humour. He is a modern master."
-- Ian McEwan, responding to a question from the National
Book Critics Circle
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James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College,
Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political
journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent
and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was
Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99. In 2007, Fenton was
awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Fenton's Selected
Poems is published by Penguin
and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
He is also the editor of The New
Faber Book of Love Poems and D.
H. Lawrence's Selected Poems (Penguin).
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The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
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 James
Fenton provides a new introduction to the Everyman's Library edition
of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. (Order direct
from Everyman's
Library, Amazon.co.uk,
or Amazon.com)
From the Publisher:
Here is the most important autobiography
from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful
from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as
the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.
Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist
in sixteenth-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental
man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder.
He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons
and was the adoring friend of—as he described them—the
“divine” Michelangelo and the “marvelous”
Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age
twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo in
Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad
castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture,
and confinement in “a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms”
is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it
is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale.
Cellini’s autobiography is not merely
the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and
evocative account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its
lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.
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Fenton on Kingsley Amis
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 'Kingsley
Amis: Against Fakery.' In The Movement Reconsidered: Essays
on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. Ed.
Zachary Leader. Oxford University Press, 2009. 106-122. (Order
from OUP in the UK,
US,
or Canada)
From the Publisher:
The Movement Reconsidered, a collection
of original essays by distinguished poets, critics, and scholars
from Britain and America, sets out to show not only that relations
between Movement and other post-war British writers were more
complex and nuanced than is usually suggested, but that the
role these relations played in shaping the current literary
scene is important and complicated. Other topics it examines
include the origins of the grouping; the role of mediating figures
such as Auden, Empson, and Orwell; the part the writers themselves
played in promoting the grouping; the interlocking network of
academics, journalists, and editors who aided them; and analogous
developments in other fields, notably philosophy, politics,
and language. The book's ultimate aim is to encourage readers
to come to Movement writing with fresh eyes and to gain a fairer
sense of its range and power.
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Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy
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 Fenton
writes the introduction for Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy,
published by Penguin.
From the Introduction:
"The job he did on the spy novel -- this
is the way he described it years later, in old age, when I interviewed
him at his home in Switzerland -- was to take a generally disprized
and trashy genre and mike it a thing of some quality."
To purchase, please visit the publisher's website
at www.penguin.co.uk.
It is also available from Amazon.co.uk.
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