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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Father", from A Small Personal Voice; the Preface to the French edition of "Seekers of Truth"; and a piece, previously unpublished in this country, on her passionate view of Sufism.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.

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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.

British Edition Contents: American Edition Contents:
Short Stories
The Habit of Loving
To Room Nineteen
Outside the Ministry
Spies I Have Known
Homage for Isaac Babel
A Woman on a Roof
Short Stories
The Old Chief Mshlanga
A Sunrise on the Veld
The Habit of Loving
The Eye of God in Paradise
How I Finally Lost My Heart
England versus England
Outside the Ministry
One Off the Short List
Homage for Isaac Babel
Between Men
To Room Nineteen
The Words He Said
A Letter from Home
The Temptation of Jack Orkney
From the Novels
The Grass is Singing
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for A Decent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Good Terrorist
From the Novels
The Grass is Singing
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
The Golden Notebook
The Four-Gated City
Briefing for a Decent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
The Diaries of Jane Somers
Reportage
Going Home
In Pursuit of the English
From Asia
Various
Preface to The Golden Notebook
From A Small Personal Voice:
My Father
Afterword fo The Story of an African Farm
Allah Be Praised
Non-Fiction
Going Home
My Father
Afterword to The Story of an African Farm
Preface to the French Edition of Seekers After Truth