New Grub Street (Modern Library Classics)

With characteristic perversity, Orwell wrote that England had "produced very few better novelists" than George Gissing. Publication of this new, usefully annotated edition of Gissing's masterpiece roughly coincided with the centenary of his death, last year. This portrait of toilers in late-nineteenth-century London's literary world depicts abject professional, personal, and marital disappointment -- and the rise of one (in many ways appealing) man who maneuvers to snatch the glittering prizes. Very few novels paint so unsparing yet subtle a picture of the selfishness of most human motivation; and though this intricate, perfectly plotted story is unrelievedly grim (the earnest, the decent, and the kind are all utterly defeated and broken up by life, and success, as we're offhandedly reminded by the one successful character, "has nothing whatever to do with moral deserts"), it's also -- unbelievably -- ceaselessly absorbing, ironic, and often extremely (if truly darkly) funny. It's the greatest novel in English about failure -- about men "capable of better things than they had done or would ever do"; Orwell's own Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a pale reflection.

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