books in order

Harold Pinter Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Dwarfs (1956)

Collections

  1. The Birthday Party / The Room (1959)
  2. The Caretaker / The Dumb Waiter (1960)
  3. Seven Plays of the Modern Theatre (1962)
  4. Three Plays (1962)
  5. The Dwarfs And Nine Revue Sketches (1965)
  6. The Tea Party and Other Plays (1967)
  7. Two Plays and a Film Script (1967)
  8. A Night Out / Night School (1968)
  9. Landscape & Silence (1969)
  10. Collected Screenplays (1972)
  11. Pinter Plays (1976)
  12. Complete Works, Vol. 1 (1977)
  13. Poems and Prose, 1949-77 (1978)
  14. The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Screenplays (1981)
  15. Compete Works: Four (1981)
  16. Best Radio Plays of 1981 (1982)
  17. Other Places (1982)
  18. Party Time / The New World Order (1993)
  19. Birthday Party / The Room / Dumb Waiter / Slight Ache / The Hothouse / Night Out / Black and White (1996)
  20. The Homecoming / Tea Party / The Baseme*nt / Landscape / Silence / Night / That’s Your Trouble / That’s All (1997)
  21. Tea Party and The Baseme*nt (1998)
  22. Harold Pinter : 4 Plays (1998)
  23. Various Voices (1998)
  24. Celebration / The Room (2000)
  25. Mountain Language / Ashes to Ashes (2001)
  26. Press Conference (2002)
  27. The Essential Pinter (2006)
  28. Ashes To Ashes And Other Plays (2009)

Plays

  1. The Birthday Party (1957)
  2. The Dumb Waiter (1957)
  3. The Room (1957)
  4. The Hothouse (1958)
  5. A Slight Ache (1958)
  6. The Caretaker (1960)
  7. The Collection (1961)
  8. The Lover (1962)
  9. The Home Coming (1964)
  10. Tea Party (1965)
  11. Landscape (1968)
  12. Old Times (1971)
  13. Monologue (1973)
  14. No Man’s Land (1975)
  15. The Proust Screenplay (1977)
  16. Betrayal (1978)
  17. Family Voices (1981)
  18. Victoria Station (1982)
  19. One for the Road (1984)
  20. Mountain Language (1988)
  21. The Heat of the Day (1989)
  22. The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
  23. The New World Order (1991)
  24. Party Time (1991)
  25. The Trial (1993)
  26. Moonlight (1993)
  27. Ashes to Ashes (1996)
  28. Remembrance of Things Past (2000)
  29. The Pres and an Officer (2018)
  30. The Short Plays of Harold Pinter (2018)

Anthologies edited

  1. 100 Poems By 100 Poets (1986)

Non fiction

  1. Conversations with Pinter (1996)
  2. War Is Peace (2001)
  3. Death Etc (2005)
  4. Extraordinary Rendition (2005)
  5. Art, Truth and Politics (2006)
  6. Not One More Death (2006)
  7. The Carnage Continues, and Now for Trident! (2006)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Harold Pinter Books Overview

The Dwarfs

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter’s only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.

The Birthday Party / The Room

In The Birthday Party, a musician who escapes to a dilapidated boarding house becomes the victim of a ritual murder in which everyone assassins, victim, and observers implacably plays out the role assigned him by fate. The Room, a derelict boarding house again becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Black man suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.

The Caretaker / The Dumb Waiter

Jacket description. back: In all of Pinter’s plays, seemingly ordinary events become charged with profound, if elusive, meaning, haunting pathos, and wild comedy. In The Caretaker, a tramp finds lodging in the derelict house of two brothers; in The Dumbwaiter, a pair of gunmen wait for the kill in a decayed lodging house. Harold Pinter gradually exposes the inner strains and fear of his characters, alternating hilarity and character to create and almost unbearable edge of tension.

Collected Screenplays

This collection of screenplays includes ‘The Servant’, ‘The Pumpkin Eater’, ‘The Quiller Memorandum’, ‘Accident’, ‘The Go Between’, ‘The Last Tycoon’, ‘Langrishe, Go Down’, and ‘The Proust Screenplay.’

Complete Works, Vol. 1

This volume collects some of the author’s most famous writings, including plays, short stories, and essays.

Other Places

Book jacket/back: When this triptich of new plays by Harold Pinter opened in London in October 1982 it was celebrated by critics and audiences alike as an electrifying theatrical event that confirmed once again the author’s undisputed place in the forefront of today’s dramatists. ‘The first two plays in ‘Other Places‘ are strange, comic, ansd fascinating, but you would know they were Pinter if you met them in yoru dreams. However, the third play, ‘A Kind of Alaska,’ which strikes me on instant acquaintance as a masterpiece moves one in a way no work of his has ever done before…
Never before have I Known a Pinter play to leave one so emotionally wrung through.’ Michael Billington, The Guardian. ‘Harold Pinter is writing at the top of his powers…
It has taken some of us time to learn Pinter’s language. He was never less obscure than here, or more profoundly eloquent about the fragile joy of being alive.’ John Barber, The Daily TelegraphIn ‘A Kind of Alaska,’ a middle aged woman wakes up after nearly thirty years passed in a coma induced by sleeping sickness. ‘Victoria Station’ is a hilarious nocturnal dialogue on a car radio between a lost taxi driver and his controller; ‘Family Voices,’ originally broadcast as a radio play and subsequently presented in a ‘platform performance,’ is a set of parallel monologues in the form of letters which a mother, son and father may have written to each other but never exchanged.

Party Time / The New World Order

Born in London in 1930, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary playwrights. These two plays, Party Time and The New World Order, work in chilling tandem, each demonstrating the inevitable brutality that comes with a total conviction of right. Party Time is a terrifying portrait of the culpable indifference of a privileged class, of the cruelty engendered in its members by political disruption, and of their merciless extinction of dissent. At an elegant cocktail party, a stylish bourgeoisie discusses country clubs and summer homes, while below in the streets a sinister military presence protects them from the unmentionable horrors of poverty, vulgarity, squalor. In The New World Order, two interrogators harass a man whom they condemn for his questioning of received ideas, and whom we know only as threat to their closed vision of democracy.

Harold Pinter : 4 Plays

The first in the collected plays of Harold Pinter, this volume contains his first six plays, spanning the years between 1957 1960, as well as two short stories written before he turned to the theatre.

Various Voices

Hailed by The New York Times as ‘one of the most important playwrights of our day,’ Harold Pinter is the author of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker just a few of his plays that have become seminal works in our literary canon. In Various Voices, Pinter presents his own selections from over fifty years of prose, poetry, and political writings, offering insight into the man and his oeuvre. Now in paperback, this edition includes recently written new poems and prose. His nonfiction selections span ‘A Note on Shakespeare’ 1950 to ‘An Interview with Mireia Aragay’ 1996; the short stories begin with ‘Kullus’ 1949 and end with ‘Tess’ 2000; and the poetry ranges from ‘School Life’ 1948 to ‘They All Rang’ 1999. The political writings illustrate the lucidity of Pinter’s views on human rights issues.

Celebration / The Room

Jack Kroll in Newsweek has called Harold Pinter ‘the most fascinating, enigmatic and accomplished dramatist in the English language.’ Since his first full length play, The Birthday Party 1958, and continuing with The Homecoming 1965, Pinter has trained a sharp eye on the strange dynamics of modern family life. In his newest play, Celebration, he continues to examine the darker places of relationships. Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life. Also included in this volume is Pinter’s classic play The Room /i.. Both plays are invested with the elements that make Pinter’s work unique: the disturbingly familiar dialogue, subtle characterization, and abrupt mood and power shifts among characters, which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny.

Mountain Language / Ashes to Ashes

Two plays in one volume: ‘Mountain Language’ ‘extraordinarily economical and extraordinarily chilling’; and ‘Ashes to Ashes’ ‘dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes’.

The Essential Pinter

Harold Pinter is one of our most profound poets and playwrights, with work ranging from his plays The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal to such poems as ‘The Bombs’ and ‘Death.’ A writer known for his searing exploration of power, Pinter gives us an electrifying look into the often uncomfortable relationships between people whether family members or political opponents. The Essential Pinter, which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold Pinter. In voyaging in, we not only come to fully appreciate the breadth of a body of work spanning over fifty years, but acquire a better understanding of human interaction.

The Birthday Party

Presents the building blocks of an improv comedy characterisation, plot and environment an extensive series of progressive scene set ups and exercises, and practical advice on forming and running an improv comedy troupe. Improv Comedy is a definitive course in the practice of this popular theatre genre, as well as a valuable text for writers wishing to study the basics of controlled spontaneity as a path to believable humour.

The Hothouse

A black comedy set in a government run mental institution, The Hothouse revolves around a sinister murder plot hatched against a backdrop of corruption, sexual favors, and hopeless bureaucratic ineptitude. Beneath the surface comedy there are frightening implications concerning a bureaucracy ostensibly dedicated to humanitarian concerns, but where people are referred to by numbers and forgotten as easily as troublesome figures on a balance sheet. Written in 1958, The Hothouse was first performed at London’s Hampstead Theatre in April 1980, in a production directed by Pinter himself. ‘A blistering funny play…
. Hothouse is wild, impudent, fiercely funny.’ Jack Kroll, Newsweek

The Caretaker

This play was first performed in 1960. Harold Pinter specializes in the tragicomedy of the breakdown of communication, broadly in the tradition of the theatre of the absurds and this is demonstrated in both ‘The Caretaker‘ and ‘The Birthday Party’.

The Lover

Another Off Broadway success by one of the theatre’s most inventive and versatile writers. A subtle blending of artful nuance, veiled menace and zany humor.

The Home Coming

When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit London and his family, he finds himself prey to old conflicts. But now it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family’s struggle for supremacy. The playwright’s other works include ‘The Birthday Party’ and ‘Old Times’.

Old Times

‘Old Times‘ was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 1 June 1971. It was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in July 2004.

No Man’s Land

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience ‘the best working year of my life.’ Although never produced, Harold Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written. With fidelity to Proust’s text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

Betrayal

Part of a collection of Harold Pinter’s works, this is a comedy of sexual manners in which Pinter captures the psyche’s sly manoeuvres for self respect with sardonic forgiveness. Written in 1978 by the author of ‘The Caretaker’, ‘The Lover’, ‘The Homecoming’ and ‘The Birthday Party’.

Mountain Language

Two plays in one volume: ‘Mountain Language‘ ‘extraordinarily economical and extraordinarily chilling’; and ‘Ashes to Ashes’ ‘dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes’.

The Comfort of Strangers

A collection of Harold Pinter’s screenplays. ‘The Comfort of Strangers‘ is based on Ian McEwan’s novel and the film of Pinter’s screenplay is directed by Paul Schrader, and stars Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken. This collection also includes ‘Reunion’, ‘Turtle Diary’ and ‘Victory’.

The New World Order

A collection of Harold Pinter’s screenplays. ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ is based on Ian McEwan’s novel and the film of Pinter’s screenplay is directed by Paul Schrader, and stars Helen Mirren and Christopher Walken. This collection also includes ‘Reunion’, ‘Turtle Diary’ and ‘Victory’.

Moonlight

In one of the most exciting theatrical events of the nineties, Harold Pinter has written his first full length play since the internationally acclaimed Betrayal in 1978. Pinter, ‘one of the most important playwrights of our day’ The New York Times, again proves himself a vital and innovative literary voice. Set in two bedrooms and an indefinite dark space, Moonlight is the story of a father on his deathbed, rehashing his youth, loves, lusts, and betrayals with his wife, while simultaneously his two sons clinical, conspiratorial, the bloodless, intellectual offspring of a hearty anti intellectual sit in the shadows, speaking enigmatically and cyclically, stepping around and around the fact of their estrangement from their father, rationalizing their love hate relations with him and the distance that they are unable to close even when their mother attempts to call them home. In counterpoint to their uncomprehending isolation between the extremes of the death before life and the death after is their younger sister, Bridget, who lightly bridges the gaps between youth and age, death and life.

Ashes to Ashes

First presented by the Royal Court Theatre in London in September of 1996, Ashes to Ashes is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca’s recollections of an abusive ex lover, questions her relentlessly in his need for a single truth. In her seamless blending of what she knows of violence with the wider violence of the world, Rebecca reveals an eerie communion with the dead victims of unnamed political barbarities.

100 Poems By 100 Poets

To pass the time on a long train ride from London to Cromwell, playwright Harold Pinter and his two companions, Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury, set up a challenge: Choose 100 Poems By 100 Poets living poets excluded to represent the finest poetry ever written in English. The three agreed to organize this collection unconventionally, alphabetically by author rather than chronologically. The resulting anthology is challenging, eclectic, very personal, and great fun. With its surprising juxtapositions and gargantuan range of voice and style, 100 Poems By 100 Poets brings old favorites into a new light and less well known poems out of the shadows.

Conversations with Pinter

For more than twenty years, Mel Gussow, a drama critic for the New York Times, has been meeting Harold Pinter to talk about work and life, plays and people. At the core of this book is a series of lengthy interviews some of the most extensive that Pinter has ever given all published here in full for the first time. Pinter and Gussow first meet in 1971, when Old Times is a new play and Pinter’s status as a major writer is still being confirmed. Then come public and private conversations in the eighties, when the voice of Pinter’s political commitment is first heard. And finally, over a period of a week in September 1993, the two talk after the London premiere of Pinter’s latest play, Moonlight. Here the playwright is in a more mellow mood, happy to contemplate his early life and to admit to a political agenda behind such plays as The Birthday Party. Through these and other revealing insights, he allows us to see the complete arc of his work to date in its true light. The resulting book is one of the most thoughtful and intimate portraits of the writer yet to appear. In fact, it is a kind of self portrait, since, intentionally, it is Pinter who does most of the talking. Though famously reticent on the subjects of his work and his private life, Pinter opens up for Gussow in a manner both beguilingly frank and refreshingly informative.

Death Etc

Throughout his life, playwright and political activist Harold Pinter has consistently cast light on the hypocrisy of conformist truths in pure and simple terms. Awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize in 2004 for his poetry condemning U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Pinter has succeeded as no other of his generation in combining his artistry with his political activism. Death Etc. brings together Pinter’s most poignant and especially relevant writings in this time of war. From chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power, to essays on the state sponsored terrorism of present day regimes, to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless mas*ses that perish unrecognized, Mr. Pinter s writings are as essential to the preservation of open debate as to our awareness of personal involvement in the fate of our global community.

Not One More Death

Prominent musicians, playwrights, scientists and writers look at how public opinion is wilfully ignored, and ‘democracy’ used as a figleaf for US imperial ambitions in the Middle East. Not One More Death examines the record of US and UK troops in Iraq, questions Bush and Blair’s position under international law, and considers the responsibilities of artists, writers and the wider public in a time of war and occupation. Published in collaboration with the Stop the War Coalition www. stopwar. org. uk.

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