A Bit off the Map and Other Stories
by Angus Wilson
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Written in the 1950s, the eight stories collected here are brilliantly of their time: the decade of rubber plants, espresso bars and skiffle, of Suez, Teddy Boys and Angry Young Men. With compassion and deadly accuracy, Angus Wilson charts the scandals and secrets of the respectable middle classes - Kennie, the Borstal Boy mascot of an intellectual clique; June Raven, an SW3 hostess who gets over-involved with one of her publisher-husband's authors; Lord Peacehaven, retired megalomaniac; show more Maurice Liebig, teenage pawn in a family feud; and the mad old man who finds the justice of God in a hen roost. show lessTags
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38+ Works 2,881 Members
Angus Wilson was born in Sussex, the youngest of six sons, and spent several of his childhood years in South Africa. A series of odd jobs was followed by a position in the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum, where he worked on replacing as many as possible of the 300,000 books destroyed during the bombing, and later as deputy show more superintendent of the reading room. Writing short stories on weekends, he was immediately successful. In 1955 he left the museum to become a full-time writer. James Gindin has, with some exaggeration, declared that "Angus Wilson is the best contemporary English novelist." Anglo Saxon Attitudes (1956) is a long, intricate, and witty novel that satirizes, none too gently, such sacred British institutions as the church, the universities, and Her Majesty's Government. The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958) won the James Tait Black Memorial Award for fiction in 1959. The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) is a story of conflict and conscience in a microcosm, the London Zoo in the 1970s. In Late Call (1965), a retired couple face problems of readjustment when they go to live with their widowed son. No Laughing Matter (1967) traces the fortunes of a British family throughout half a century beginning in 1912. In addition to short stories and novels, Wilson wrote Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels (1952), Tempo: The Impact of Television on the Arts (1966), The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977), and The World of Charles Dickens (1970). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1957
- Dedication
- For Francis and Honoria
- First words
- See, some people go about like it doesn't matter why we're here or what it's all for, but I'm not like that.
- Quotations
- If the polished yet willing rubber plant which loomed above them had now the familiarityof the aspidistra - once, after all, also a modish exotic - the unselfconscious dowdiness of the members of The Crowd only seemed designe... (show all)d further to deny the tropical origin of the fleshy leaves, to insist on their complete acclimatization to the English lower-middle-class world.
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- Members
- 82
- Popularity
- 388,984
- Rating
- (2.38)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 8
- ASINs
- 6
