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George Gissing

New Grub Street

Paperback (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform April 26, 2013)

New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing's most highly regarded novel, is the story of men and women forced to make their living by writing. Their daily lives and broken dreams, made and marred by the rigors of urban life and the demands of the fledgling mass communications industry, are presented with vivid realism and unsentimental sympathy. Its telling juxtaposition of the writing careers of the clever and malicious Jaspar Milvain and the honest and struggling Edward Reardon quickly made New Grub Street into a classic work of late Victorian fiction.

"His naturalism has an excoriating veracity; relentless in its judgements but fine as well in its attention to detail ... I have never learnt so much from a novel about the actual day-to-day life texture of life in late 19th-century London." -Janet Daley, The Times

“Gissing's masterpiece about London literary life in the 1880's…. a strong empathy with almost all his characters, especially the women, broadened and deepened by a grasp of the way ideas shape experience and social forces overwhelm the individual. Gissing was willing to risk suffering, to face private pain and social pain, poverty and its quiet humiliations….. Almost all his novels are about a single subject: the cost of poverty and social isolation to people of intelligence and sensitivity. They're full of thin-skinned novelists in garrets; bright, passionate, unmarriageable young women; lower-middle-class intellectuals torn with hatred and sympathy for the poor and hatred and envy for the rich -- victims of a perverse, money-soaked social order that they can neither enter nor reject. Orwell said, ‘Gissing's novels are a protest against the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability,’ but the protest is muted by the fact that Gissing himself partly craved respectability. He might have been a socialist if he'd had more money; instead, the vision is of endurance and defeat. ‘New Grub Street’ carries it to almost unbearable intensity.” -George Packer; The New York Times

“The most impressive of Gissing’s books . . . England has produced very few better novelists.” —George Orwell

ISBN
1484820053 / 9781484820056
Pages
456
Weight
44.8 oz.
Dimensions
8.5 x 1.0 in.

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