Beautiful and deeply meditative poems on illness, ageing, legacy and death from one of Australia’s finest writers.To be a long time dying is largely a phenomenon of modern medicine. The Light As It Grows Dark is reportage from this new country; hard-won revelations about the journey’s end: ‘This insane last phase/ When everything about you goes downhill.’A poet long before he was a journalist or broadcaster, Clive James was 70 when his health irret...

Step into the heart of Jamaica through the eyes of someone who lived its stories, traditions, struggles, and triumphs firsthand.The Fantasy: A True Jamaican Living is a powerful memoir by Clive James that captures the essence of growing up in Portland, Jamaica. From childhood adventures and family traditions to the rhythms of reggae and dancehall, the book paints a vivid picture of Jamaican culture and the values that shape its people. Through twenty-one engaging chapters, readers ...

"[A] collection of Clive James's essays on a variety of literary topics . . . This is sanity, humor and acuity in the face of death" ( The Wall Street Journal).In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do," James moved his library to his Cambridge house, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write." James is the award-win...

"A loving and breezy set of essays" on today's most addictive TV shows from "an incisive and hilarious critic" ( Slate).Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched.Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysi...

**The first instalment of his famed autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs is a hilarious and touching introduction to the life of the author, broadcaster, critic and poet, Clive James.'It is one of the most tender, frank and, above all, funny accounts of growing up I have ever read' –Michael Parkinson**In the first instalment of James's memoirs we follow the young Clive on his journey from boyhood to the cusp of manhood, when his days of wearing short trousers are fina...

**A hilarious journey through the life and television of the 1970s and 80s, this nostalgic time capsule collects the treasured columns of Clive James.'The funniest writer in Britain' – Sunday Times**Clive James is the man who created TV criticism as a genre, bringing to it all the breadth of reference, intelligence and delight that he brought to more conventionally highbrow art forms. At a time when there were only three TV channels in the UK, and a primetime show ...

A best-selling classic around the world, Clive James’s hilarious memoir has long been unavailable in the United States.Before James Frey famously fabricated his memoir, Clive James wrote a refreshingly candid book that made no claims to be accurate, precise, or entirely truthful, only to entertain. In an exercise of literary exorcism, James set out to put his childhood in Australia behind him by rendering it as part novel, part memoir. Now, nearly thirty years afte...

Travel writing at its humorous best, Flying Visits collects the Postcards of Clive James originally written for the Observer between 1976 and 1983 – full of his distinctive wit and satire.Whether enduring Australian television, exploring the mystifying Soviet Union, watching sumo training in Japan, or enjoying Sondheim via serial killers in New York, James is never less than thoroughly entertaining.As a time-capsule of the period or as a h...

Dante's immortal vision of Hell shines "as it never did before in English verse" (Edward Mendelson) in Clive James's new translation of Inferno.The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of Hell, confronting its many t...

Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death—and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful and scornful songs that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably b...

**Blending the critical essay with poetry, Gate of Lilacs is a collection of verse written by Clive James in response to – and profoundly inspired by – the work of Marcel Proust.'James picks out the characters, the motifs and the moments that set his memory ablaze, just as Marcel was able to conjure such visions from a tisane-infused madeleine' – Literary Review**Over a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than readi...

**The publication of Clive James's Sentenced to Life was a major literary event. Facing the end, James looked back over his life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty to produce his finest work: poems of extraordinary power that spoke to our most elemental emotions. Injury Time is its outstanding successor.'James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational' – Joan Bakewell, Independent**With more time on the cl...