Books published by publisher Peter Owen Publishers

The picaresque story of 96-year-old Lily Bourbon, who marries her way from prostitute to Poet Laureate in the USSR and finds a new life in the U.S.Lily was a beautiful young prostitute recruited by the Bolsheviks to service the Communist elite. As a result of a fortuitous marriage to Andrei Bourbon, famous poet, futurist and artistic associate of Malevich and Mayakovsky, her own verse is delivered to the official Communist newspapers, together with an entirely invented revolutionary biography. Before long, she is made poet laureate and feted as an idealized symbol of the Soviet era, while Andrei, after being incarcerated in a mental hospital by Lily, disappears in the purges. After the collapse of several marriages—and the Soviet Union—she leaves Russia for the United States. This is where we meet her, still striking-looking and engaged to a naive American, starting out again at the age of ninety-six. Following further bizarre and picaresque adventures, she reaches for her greatest honour yet—to be "Queen Lily the First" of the newly created island state of Grande Bravo.

A fable about the disintegration of a good man. At the insistence of his wife, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army for a civilian job as the inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory, near the Russian border. Attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is at a loss in a world of smugglers, profiteers, and small crooks. Eibenschutz soon finds he can no longer distinguish law from justice. When he discovers that his wife is pregnant by his own clerk, he spends more time away from home. Spending his hours at the border tavern, he finds himself hopelessly drawn to a beautiful gypsy woman, Euphemia. But she is prepared to share the bed of the landlord and Eibenschutz's enemy, Jadlowker, an unprincipled profiteer who has made the tavern a beacon for local smuggling activity.

This collection of previously unpublished work has been carefully chosen to present the most fully rounded portrait of Osamu Dazai, the tragic genius of 20th century Japanese literature. By turns hilarious, introspective, ironic, and mystical, these remarkable tales reveal the full range of Dazai’s talents, now lost to the world thanks to his dissolute life and eventual suicide.

Originally published under a pseudonym shortly after the First World War, a novel of embracing dualityEmil Sinclair boasts of a theft that he has not committed and subsequently finds himself blackmailed by a bully. He turns to Max Demian, in whom he finds a friend and spiritual mentor. This strangely self-possessed figure is able to lure Emil out of his ordinary home-life and convince him of an existing alternative world of corruption and evil. Progressing from an orthodox education through to philosophical mysticism, Emil’s search for self-awareness culminates in a meeting with Demian’s mother—the symbol and personification of motherhood.

Digby Durant’s savage satire on living in the country begins with Percival Moat nearly eating his missing brother’s finger, which has mysteriously found its way into a home-baked steak-and-kidney pie. Addle is that kind of place. This is the starting point for an incompetent and hilarious police investigation by the local force. Completely original, macabre, funny, and serious at the same time, Durrant’s Addle is a delight.

The place held by the Heart Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism parallels in some important ways that of the Gospel of John in Christianity. Each is foundational and central to its tradition. Each demands the practitioner's transformation through prayer and meditation. And, although the approach to deep and abiding human experience that is found in the Heart Sutra is quite different from that expressed in John's gospel, there is a resonance between the Sutra's emptying of every vestige of self-identity and John's call for a radical reconfiguration of consciousness. In this book, a Christian theologian reads the Heart Sutra, allowing its teaching on emptiness of self to percolate through his understanding of the central teachings of the Christian tradition - incarnation and trinit y - as these are disclosed in the Gospel of John.