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Such Darling Dodos

Angus Wilson
€17.99
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Author_Angus Wilson
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Faber Finds

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571249008
  • Weight: 169g
  • Dimensions: 126 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Feb 2009
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

Towards the end of Angus Wilson's life his short stories were entombed in a collected volume. By way of signifying the corpus was sadly complete that made sense but it didn't do justice to the importance and quality of his work in this medium.

Three volumes of short stories were published - The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos and A Bit Off the Map. Faber Finds are reissuing these original selections.

Angus Wilson made his initial reputation by his short stories, The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos being his first two published books, appearing in 1949 and 1950 respectively.

When reviewing Such Darling Dodos C. P. Snow perceptively wrote, 'Part-bizarre, part-savage and part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it on the contemporary scene. It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the human party, and was surveying it, half-enviously, half-contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to strip-off the comfortable pretences and show that this party is pretty horrifying after all ... Sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant, sometimes most moving; no one could deny Mr Wilson's gift.'

As Margaret Drabble points out in her biography of Angus Wilson (to be reissued in Faber Finds) his stories were in their own way to be as iconoclastic and irreverent as John Osborne's plays were to be. They not so much deserve as demand to be re-read.
About Angus Wilson
Sir Angus Wilson CBE was born in Bexhill, Sussex, in 1913, the youngest of six boys, and grew up in a series of residential hotels after his family ran through their inheritance. After Westminster School and Oxford University, he joined the British Museum Library. In World War II, he worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where the stress caused a breakdown and he took up writing as therapy. After the war, he returned to the British Museum and replaced 300,000 books that had been destroyed. Following the success of his second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), he gave up his job to dedicate time to writing. Homosexuality was still illegal, yet Wilson always wrote freely about his world; some libraries refused to stock his novels. Wilson became a Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly with Malcolm Bradbury, established their ground-breaking MA in Creative Writing in 1970. He always insisted that his life companion Tony Garrett was acknowledged as his partner (Garrett was fired from his job as a probation officer). He and Tony left England for France in 1985, but Wilson's illness forced their return. The Royal Literary Fund supported Wilson in his final years. He died in 1991.

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