The Doris Lessing Reader Year First Published: 1989 First Published by: Alfred A. Knopf Category: Novel, Short Stories, Non-Fiction This Edition: American first edition ISBN: 0-394-57307-2

From the book jacket:

"DORIS LESSING's work has been an integral part of our literature for four decades. In her novels, stories, reportage, and essays she has explored more aspects of our world - from the workings of the mind and heart of the workings of the cosmos - than perhaps any other writer alive today. And in The Doris Lessing Reader we are given the best possible way to encounter this extraordinary writer across the great range of her work.

Here are selections - made by the author herself - from her first novel, The Grass Is Singing; from her Children of Violence series (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, The Four-Gated City); and from the Canopus novels Shikasta, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. There are excerpts from The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and The Diaries of Jane Somers (which comprises two novels she initially published pseudonymously). There are fourteen short stories, ranging from her early classic of life in Africa, "The Old Chief Mshlanga", to the famous study of suicide "To Room 19", to the brilliant novella "The Temptation of Jack Orkney", And there are four samples of her non-fiction, including a selection from Going Home, her 1957 account of her return to Africa; the essay "My Father", from A Small Personal Voice; the Preface to the French edition of "Seekers of Truth"; and a piece, previously unpublished in this country, on her passionate view of Sufism.

Here then, in one volume, is a wide and deep representation of the work of this unique writer who continues to surprise us - and convince us - with the ever-increasing power of her imagination and her intelligence.

• British Edition

Comments:

I was surprised to find that the contents of this American Edition differ from the British Edition, not only in quantity but the excerpts themselves are also different. The British Edition also contains a preface which this edition does not.