Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings

A collection of the virtuoso nonfiction writings by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

As a novelist, John Fowles needs no introduction. His popularity and his place in the English literary canon have been assured for several decades. His novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman became instant classics upon publication. But his nonfiction writings are less well known, in part because their appearance has been scattered in ephemeral periodicals, academic journals, or as forewords or introductions to other authors' work. Wormholes is the first representative gathering of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings.

Wormholes is divided into four sections--Writing and the Self, Culture and Society, Literature and Literary Criticism, and Nature and the Nature of Nature; these thirty pieces, dating from 1963 to the present, range in length from a single page to substantial essays. Wormholes is a reflection of the writer's developing views on the art of fiction and on the relationship of literature to life and morality throughout the mature, fertile period of his career. Not only is it a rich mine of essays as art, it is also geography of the mind of one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.