I have arranged these poems, not according to chronology but in what I hope is the most easily readable form. Nothing has been included from the two earliest pamphlets. I date my poetic appearance from the publication of "A Private Country" in 1943. Poems from the following volumes have been included: "Poems" edited by Oswell Blakeston (Fortune Press, 1938); "A Private Country" (Faber and Faber, 1943); "Cities, Plains and People" (Faber and Faber, 1946); "On Seeming to Presume" (Faber and Faber, 1948); "Sappho: a play in verse" (Faber and Faber, 1950); "The Tree of Idleness" (Faber and Faber, 1955); and "Private Drafts" (privately printed in Nicosia, Cyprus, 1955). L.D.

This captivating Mediterranean novel was written by Lawrence Durrell immediately after finishing his exquisite vignette about Corfu, Prospero's Cell, and a decade before Justine. The story is set on Crete just after the War, as an odd assortment of English travellers come ashore from a cruise ship to explore the island and in particular to examine a dangerous local labyrinth. They include an extrovert painter, a spiritualist, a Protestant spinster with a fox terrier, an antiquarian peer and minor poet, a soldier with guilty memories of the Cretan resistance, a pretty convalescent and an eccentric married couple. To some extent the book is a roman à clef and Durrell's characters talk with great reality about their experiences, themselves and a certain psychological unease that has led most of them to embark on their journey. The climax is a disastrous visit to the labyrinth, with its reported minotaur. The novel is a gripping piece of story-telling, full of atmosphere and the vivid first-hand writing about Mediterranean landscape and people of which Durrell was a master. [ Cefalu (1947; republished as The Dark Labyrinth in 1958) ]

The Revolt of Aphrodite consists of two novels, Tunc ('then', 'next') and its sequel Numquam ('never'). When Felix Charlock, an inventor, is approached by Merlin's, an influential and successful firm with interests everywhere, something about the extremely generous offer makes him hesitate. But as time goes on, he finds himself tied to 'the Firm' both personally and contractually - and disentangling himself will cost more than he knows... With a cast of tantalising characters, the two novels take the reader from Turkey to Greece, from Switzerland to England. Enigmatic and engrossing, with a marvellous sweep of action and ideas, the novels show Durrell is at his most gothic and comic, and most widely allusive.

Best known for his novels and travel writing, Lawrence Durrell defied easy classification within twentieth-century Modernism. His anti-authoritarian tendencies put him at odds with many contemporaries—aesthetically and politically. However, thanks to a compelling recontextualization by editor James Gifford, these thirty-eight previously unpublished and out-of-print essays and letters reveal that Durrell's maturation as an artist was rich, complex, and subtle. Durrell fans will treasure this selection of rare nonfiction, while scholars of Durrell, Modernist literature, anti-authoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford's fine editorial work.

A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence Durrell.In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller's contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller's life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that...