Malcolm Lowry Books In Order

Novels

Ultramarine (1933)
Under the Volcano (1947)
Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1969)
October Ferry to Gabriola (1970)

Collections

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1962)
The Voyage That Never Ends (2007)

Novellas

Lunar Caustic (1968)

Non fiction

Selected Letters (1965)
Letters, 1940-52 (1988)
Sursam Corda! (1994)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Lunar Caustic
(1968)

Non fiction Book Covers

Malcolm Lowry Books Overview

Under the Volcano

Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Here the consul’s debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life. Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul’s life the Day of the Dead, 1938. His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. Yvonne’s mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul’s half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. Under the Volcano remains one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition and one man’s constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place

Malcolm Lowry was a rare talent whose ambition was equaled only by his problems. Struggling with alcoholism and singularly unable to manage his own life, he ‘believed himself to be hopelessly unlucky’; and as volume editor Nicholas Bradley points out, ‘the evidence suggests that he was right.’ This collection of short stories reveals a world of crashing prose in which Lowry draws heavily from his turbulent life to forge a tale of both heaven and hell on earth. From the rich paradise of British Columbia and the echoing beauty of Italy, to the unrelieved suffering of Mexico, Lowry’s stories are layered, interwoven tales that speak to an unrealized literary potential.
This new edition includes an introduction, chronology, and notes, providing key insight into one of the underappreciated literary minds of the twentieth century.
An exciting and offbeat addition to Oxford’s Outlooks on Canadian Literature series.

The Voyage That Never Ends

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALNotorious for a misspent life full of binges, blackouts, and unimaginable bad luck, Malcolm Lowry managed, against every odd, to complete and publish two novels, one of them, Under the Volcano, an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished writing: stories, novellas, drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviser and interrupter of his work, long, impassioned, haunting, beautiful letters overflowing with wordplay and lament, fraught short poems that display a sozzled off the cuff inspiration all Lowry’s own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes, all long out of print. Here, in The Voyage That Never Ends, the poet, translator, and critic Michael Hofmann has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to assemble the first book that reflects the full range of Lowry s extraordinary and singular achievement. The result is a revelation. In the letters acknowledged to be among modern literature s greatest we encounter a character who was, as contemporaries attested, as spellbinding and lovable as he was self destructive and infuriating. In the late fiction the long story Through the Panama, sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the little known La Mordida we discover a writer who is blazing a path into the unknown and, as he goes, improvising a whole new kind of writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel, something to top Under the Volcano, a multivolume epic and intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate redemption called, among other things, The Voyage That Never Ends . That book was never to be. What he produced instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and fiction, confession and confusion, essay and free play, that looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman Mailer and William Gass, but is like nothing else. Almost in spite of himself, Lowry succeeded in transforming his disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.

Sursam Corda!

The general tone of this second volume of letters is considerably darker than that of the first. Though Under the Volcano published in 1947 was behind Lowry, it would never leave him alone. The success of the novel became a curse: he could not avoid helping his translators; he longed for a film treatment of the book; he found it difficult to become fully engaged in new work; the celebrity associated with a best seller was, as he put it in a poem, a ‘disaster’ akin to your house burning down. Illnessses, the death of friends, threats of eviction from his beloved foreshore Dollarton home, and drink plagued Lowry. And yet, he made repeated attempts to escape his personal abysses. He made new friends, re established a good working relationship with his editor Albert Erskine, began several new projects, and continued to write superb letters. The more than 400 included here, all written during the last decade of his life, reveal a man fascinated with films, bristling with plans for his masterwork The Voyage That Never Ends, eager to discuss the virtues of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, and the work of friends like Gerald Noxon or Jimmy Stern. There is also a selection from his several hundred ‘love notes’ written to Margerie Lowry and pinned to places in the Dollarton shack or to trees along the ‘forest path to spring.’ These notes, like much else in the volume, are published here for the first time, providing interesting glimpses into Lowry’s private world. The letters written just before his sudden death in England in 1957 are among his most moving; they reveal a weariness of spirit, a deep regret for the loss of his Dollarton paradise, but also the courage, self deprecating humour, love of language, and keen intelligence that characterize everything he wrote. In addition to a critical introduction and detailed chronologies, this volume includes photographs, many of the drawings with which Lowry illustrated his letters, and reproductions of holograph letters.