Reacting to a inexorable decline into consumerism, turpitude, violence, and racism, a government redistributes its citizens into four separate regions according to personality type, partitioning the country with concrete barricades and razor wire, until a boy, taken from his family and raised to become the perfect civil servant, embarks on a mission that will change his life forever. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A richly textured and vibrant novel follows two unforgettable characters, Aldous Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual difficulties, and Helen, a serious and naive girl who is determined to lead a morally satisfying life but always finds herself in the most immoral of situations. Reprint.

Sentenced to death for forgery and swindling, Meist Von Lipwig accepts a pardon in exchange for revamping an ancient post office, but his efforts are thwarted by murderous characters who want the post office shut down.

The author of The Trick of It and Spies uses his satiric wit in a comedy featuring two unlikely lovers who have wreaked chaos in the halls of the English congress. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

When Norman Cooper, the straightlaced new dean of Canon Flubert, turns up dead, Bishop David Elworthy is desperate for help and Robert Amiss and Baroness Troutbeck find themselves investigating radical gay priests, feminist witches, and evil cult members, all of whom had much to gain from Norm Cooper's demise. Reprint.

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

Product Description: Robert Amiss, lapsed civil servant, is approached by Lord Papworth, owner of the Wrangler, to step in as business manager for the august journal and do something about its steady drain on his lordship’s finances. The magazine’s editor, Willie Lambie Crump, and his staff are firmly mired in the 1950s, technologically speaking; ideologically, the journal has always been strongly conservative...read more

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.