David Lodge Books In Order

Campus Novels Books In Order

  1. Changing Places (1975)
  2. Small World (1984)
  3. Nice Work (1988)

Novels

  1. The Picturegoers (1960)
  2. Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962)
  3. The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)
  4. Out of the Shelter (1970)
  5. How Far Can You Go? (1980)
  6. Paradise News (1991)
  7. Therapy (1995)
  8. Surprised by Summer (1996)
  9. Thinks… (2001)
  10. Author, Author (2004)
  11. Deaf Sentence (2008)
  12. A Man of Parts (2011)

Omnibus

  1. A David Lodge Trilogy (1993)
  2. Three Novels (1994)

Collections

  1. The Best of Ring Lardner (1984)
  2. The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up (1998)
  3. Scenes of Academic Life (2005)

Plays

  1. The Writing Game (1991)
  2. Secret Thoughts (2011)
  3. Home Truths: The Playscript (2012)

Novellas

  1. Home Truths (1999)

Non fiction

  1. Graham Greene (1966)
  2. Language of Fiction (1966)
  3. Jane Austen: ‘Emma’ (1968)
  4. Evelyn Waugh (1971)
  5. The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971)
  6. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972)
  7. The Modes of Modern Writing (1977)
  8. Working with Structuralism (1981)
  9. Novels of Graham Greene (1982)
  10. Write on: Occasional Essays, 1965-85 (1986)
  11. Modern Criticism and Theory (1988)
  12. After Bakhtin (1990)
  13. The Art of Fiction (1992)
  14. The Practice of Writing (1996)
  15. Consciousness and the Novel (2002)
  16. The Year of Henry James (2006)
  17. Write On (2012)
  18. Lives in Writing (2012)
  19. Quite A Good Time to be Born (2015)
  20. Writer’s Luck (2018)
  21. Varying Degrees of Success (2021)

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David Lodge Books Overview

Changing Places

When Phillip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities’ Anglo American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sun drenched Euphoric State University and rain kissed University of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows…
‘Not since Lucky Jim has such a funny book about academic life come my way’ ‘Sunday Times’.

Small World

Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet propelled academics who are on the move, in the air, and on the make, in David Lodge’s satirical ‘Small World‘. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air…
‘A wonderful tissue of outrageous coincidences and correspondences, teasing elevations of suspense and delayed climaxes’ ‘Observer’.

Nice Work

Winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and short listed for the Booker Prize, ‘Nice Work‘ is a hilarious comedy of society and class misunderstandings. When Vic Wilcox, MD of Pringle’s engineering works, meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. But, in time, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other’s worlds and about themselves. ‘A work of immense intelligence, informative, disturbing and diverting’ ‘Observer’.

Ginger, You’re Barmy

National Service: two years of square bashing, kit layout, shepherd’s pie ‘made from real shepherds’, PT and drill, relieved only by the occasional lecture on VD. Conscription has made Jonathan Browne and Mike ‘Ginger’ Brady prisoners of the British Army. But reckless, impulsive Mike and pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to this two year confiscation of their freedom. Where Jonathan chooses to keep his head down, Mike can’t help but rebel against those in charge. Then one day Mike goes too far, with consequences that threaten to overturn Jonathan’s cultivated detachment from the idiocies of military life…

The British Museum Is Falling Down

The Rhythm Method is the curse of young Adam Appleby’s life and the cause of his children’s. While Adam gestates his thesis in the British Museum, his wife worries at home because her period is late and a fourth little bundle of expensive joy seems to be on the way, thanks to ‘Vatican Roulette’. Though Adam’s experience is constantly coloured by the authors he is studying, one distinction remains clear: ‘Literature is mostly about having sex, and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.’ A sharply perceptive comic novel, ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ brilliantly captures the absurd, pitiful dilemma of Catholics in the days when the Pill was just an enticing rumour.

Out of the Shelter

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and subsequent post war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy’s early youth. But everything changes when Timothy’s glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg. Kath, who left home long ago to work for the American army, introduces her sixteen year old brother to a lifestyle that is deliriously fast, furious and extravagant. Dazzled by the indulgent habits of the American forces, but at the same time sensitive to the broken spirits of the German community, Timothy will find that his holiday is an unforgettable rite of passage in more ways than one.

How Far Can You Go?

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and their peers were bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the way from the 1950s to the ’70s. On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society the appearance of the pill, the disappearance of Hell and the advent of COC Catholics for an Open Church. It was inevitable that things would change radically. But how far could it go? How far could they go? And where would it all end? Find out in this razor sharp novel of satiric insight and comic despair.

Paradise News

Agnostic theologian Bernard Walsh has a professional interest in heaven. But, when he travels to Hawaii with his father, Jack, it is not in quest of a vacation paradise; it is to visit Jack’s dying, estranged sister. The hand of fate and family tensions frustrate the planned reunion, however. And surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, girls looking for Mr Right, a freeloading anthropologist, and assorted tourists all determinedly pursuing their humdrum visions of paradise, Bernard finds Waikiki more like purgatory. Until, that is, he stumbles upon something he had given up hope of finding the astonishing possibility of love…

Therapy

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physioTherapy nor aromaTherapy, cognitive behaviour Therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid life angst. As Tubby’s life fragments under the weight of his self obsession, he embarks via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment, in an ingenious, hilarious and poignant novel of neuroses.

Thinks…

David Lodge’s novels have earned comparisons to those of John Updike and Philip Roth and established him as ‘a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic’ The New York Times. Thinks…
, his witty new novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciousness, unfolds in the alternating voices of Ralph Messenger, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, and Helen Reed, a novelist and writer in residence at the university. Mutually attracted, the two end up in a moral standoff that is shattered by events that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph’s dictum: ‘we can never know for certain what another person is thinking.’

Author, Author

Henry James takes center stage in David Lodge’s brilliant novel of literary ambition, creativity, and rivalry as revealed in James s public career and private life. Pivoting on the dramatic first night of his play, Guy Domville, and thronged with vividly drawn characters, Author, Author presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England. But at its heart is a portrait, rendered with remarkable empathy, of a writer who never achieved popular success in his lifetime nor resolved his sexual identity yet wrote some of the greatest novels in the English language about love.

Deaf Sentence

A witty, tender novel about the travails of old middle age, from a Booker finalist

Desmond Bates is a recently retired linguistics professor vexed by his encroaching deafness and at loose ends in his personal life. Without the purposeful routine of the academic year, he finds his role reduced to that of escort and house husband while his wife’s late flowering career as the owner of a home design store flourishes. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his querulous, elderly father, an ex dance musician. But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman who seeks his support in matters academic and not so academic; and whose wayward and unpredictable behavior threatens to destabilize his life completely. Deaf Sentence is a funny, moving account of one man s effort to come to terms with deafness and death, aging and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human life.

A Man of Parts

‘The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now…
‘ Sequestered in his blitz battered Regent’s Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, ‘H.G.’ to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, ‘the man who invented tomorrow’; now he feels like yesterday’s man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his utopian dreams. He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic common touch which brought him into contact with most of the important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time; his plunge into socialist politics; and, his belief in free love, and energetic practice of it. Arguing with himself about his conduct, he relives his relationships with two wives and many mistresses, especially the brilliant student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West, both of whom bore him children, with dramatic and long lasting consequences. Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel; and, a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns, but always vitally human.

A David Lodge Trilogy

This omnibus lines up David Lodge’s trio of brilliantly comic novels that revolve around the University of Rummidge and the lives of its role swapping academics. When Philip Swallow, lecturer in English at Rummidge, changes places with flamboyant Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University, USA, trouble ensues. Then, ten years on, older but not noticeably wiser, they are let loose on the international conference circuit a veritable academic carnival. And finally, Dr Robyn Penrose becomes part of a scheme to learn about industry instead of reading about it, with hilarious results. David Lodge exposes the dizzy pursuit of knowledge literary, commercial, romantic and erotic with unparalleled wit and insight.

Home Truths

Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished but slightly faded reputation, is living in semi retirement with his wife, Eleanor, in an isolated cottage beneath the flight path of London’s Gatwick airport. Their old friend from college days, Sam Sharp, who has since become a successful screenplay writer, drops by unexpectedly on the way to Los Angeles. Sam is fuming over a scathing profile of himself by Fanny Tarrant, one of the new breed of pugnacious interviewers, in that day’s newspaper. Together, Sam and Adrian plan to take revenge on the journalist, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy. What follows is unexpected and upsetting for all of them, including Fanny. David Lodge’s delicious novella examines with characteristic wit and insight the tensions between private life and public interest in contemporary culture.

Language of Fiction

Now including a new introduction from the author, this major work from the pen of one of England’s finest living writers is essential reading for all those who care about the creation and appreciation of literature.

Jane Austen: ‘Emma’

David Lodge’s Emma was one of the first Macmillan Casebooks and has proved one of the most popular. Three new essays have been added in this new edition, reflecting new critical approaches such as feminism and deconstruction. The new material complements the classic studies by critics such as Arnold Kettle and Lionel Trilling. A revised and extended introduction puts the changing interpretation of Jane Austen’s novel in historical context and, together with an updated Bibliography, directs the student to useful further reading.

Modern Criticism and Theory

This reader is designed as a companion volume and is some sense, sequel to David Lodge’s 20th Century Literary Criticism A Reader. Since the earlier book was compiled, the academic study of literature has been revolutionised by the impact of structuralism and post structuralist theory. This book aims to provide, within the covers of a single book, a selection of important and representative work from all the major theorectical schools or tendencies in contemporaryr criticism, and to place them before the reader in two alternative orders one historical, the other thematic. The twenty eight authors represented are: Ferdinand de Saussure, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, Harold Bloom, E. D. Hirsch Jr, M. H. Abrams, J. Hillis Miller, Helene Cixous, Edward Said, Stanley Fish, Elaine Showalter, Paul De Man, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Geoffrey Hartman, Juliet Mitchell, Colin MacCabe, Umberto Eco.

After Bakhtin

Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In ‘After Bakhtin‘, David Lodge sketches Bakhtin’s extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourse, and on the carnivalesque to the writings of authors as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Fay Weldon and Martin Amis. Further essays study particular texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Milan Kundera illustrative of the development of the novel in its classic, modernist and postmodernist phases. Two final essays reflect on the current state of academic criticism.

The Art of Fiction

The Art of Fiction‘ is essential, thoroughly entertaining reading for writers, students and anyone who wants to understand how literature works. The articles by David Lodge, which first appeared in the ‘Independent on Sunday’, are expanded here and consider the subject under a wide range of headings such as ‘The Intrusive Author’, ‘Suspense’ and ‘Magic Realism’. Styles and techniques are illustrated in each case by passages from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, Lodge also demonstrates the richness and variety of British and American fiction.

The Practice of Writing

When it comes to the craft of writing, bestselling novelist David Lodge finds much to celebrate, analyze, and confess. In this absorbing collection of seventeen essays he ponders the work of writers he particularly admires, current and past trends in literary style, and the mechanics of the craft itself. Revealing, enlightening pieces on Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess are interspersed with personal reflections on Lodge’s own artistic and technical struggles. His insights into the contemporary world of publishing, and mass culture in general, are both trenchant and refreshing. As entertaining as it is edifying, this collection of fine writing about writing will prove valuable to students of the art as well as to Lodge’s many, loyal readers who wish to know more about his own work.

Consciousness and the Novel

Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping even rediscovery by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction mainly English and American in light of recent investigations in the sciences. How does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, Lodge pursues these questions down various paths: How does the novel’s method compare with that of other creative media such as film? How does the consciousness and unconscious of the creative writer do its work? And how can criticism infer the nature of this process through formal analysis? In essays on Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, John Updike, and Philip Roth, and in reflections on his own practice as a novelist, Lodge is able to bring to light and to engaging life the technical, intellectual, and sometimes simply mysterious working of the creative mind. 20020801

The Year of Henry James

Where do novelists get their ‘ideas’ from? How do they develop an idea into a narrative with a specific and individual form? How far is the reception of a work of fiction conditioned by factors outside the writer’s control? In the first part of this book, in revealing and often amusing reminiscence, David Lodge traces the history of his recent novel about Henry James, Author, from the very first mention of the basic idea in his notebook, through the processes of research and writing, to the publication and reception of the finished book, which was adversely affected by the appearance of another novel on the same subject some six months earlier. These two were not the only novels inspired by Henry James in circulation in the year 2004, a phenomenon which Lodge sees with hindsight as ‘a coincidence waiting to happen’, with ironic consequences that the Master himself might have invented. The essays in the second part pursue the themes of genesis, composition and reception in the work of other novelists. There are studies of key works by James himself, H.G. Wells, Vladimir Nabokov, J.M. Coetzee and Umberto Eco, and essays on the literary sources of Graham Greene’s imagination and on a significant anthology of the ‘Best of Young American Novelists’. Collectively the contents of this book throw a brilliant light on the dominant literary form of the last two centuries, in its twin aspects as work of art and commodity.

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