One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings

A genuine master of the mot and the anecdote, Burgess rarely fails to amuse in this generous selection of essays on topics as various as oranges (not only of the clockwork variety), Marilyn Monroe, God, and Yiddish humor (his favorite one-liner, the Jewish matron's response to her son's psychiatrist: "Oedipus Schmoedipus - what's it matter so long as he loves his mother?"). In other of these candid and sometimes cantankerous pieces written over the past two decades Burgess revisits his youth in Manchester, reconsiders his experiences among British colonials in Malaysia, and reevaluates his literary exile in Monaco. He examines his craft, he carps at critics, he reflects upon literature and litterateurs, from such twentieth-century giants as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to the eccentric Sitwells to fellow novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.