Brighton Rock: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Author: Greene, Graham

Brand: Penguin

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reprint

Features:

• Penguin Books

Binding: Paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 28-09-2004

Part Number: 9780142437971

Details: Product Description
"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him..."
 
Graham Greene's chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare in the pre-war underworld is a classic of its kind. Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the rise, is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of both the spirit and the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed mob boss Kite and also for the death of Hale, a reporter who threatened the livelihood of the mob, Pinkie is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, Pinkie is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands. He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale's death. For the sheer joy of it, she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice.
 

This Penguin Classics Deluxe edition features an introduction by J. M. Coetzee.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Review
“Here the probing is carried further in a brilliant and uncompromising indictment of some of the worst aspects of modern civilization, showing us the hard-boiled criminal mind not as a return to savagery but as a horrible perversion of cerebration.”
—The New York Times


“Why does this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate? Its energy and power is that of the rebellious adolescent, foreshadowing the rise of the cult of youth in the latter part of the 20th century.”
—The Guardian

“[Greene] believed his coldness vital for his art - 'There is,' he affirmed, 'a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer'.”
—John Carey
About the Author
Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose long life nearly spanned the length of the twentieth century, was one of its greatest novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his career as a sub-editor of
The Times of London. He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth book,
Orient Express, in 1932. In 1935, he trekked across northern Liberia, his first experience in Africa, recounted in
A Journey Without Maps (1936). He converted to Catholicism in 1926, an edifying decision, and reported on religious persecution in Mexico in 1938 in
The Lawless Roads, which served as a background for his famous
The Power and the Glory, one of several “Catholic” novels (
Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair). During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist, which were reflected in novels such as
The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, and
The Captain and the Enemy. In addition to his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, two books of autobiography—
A Sort of Life and
Ways of Escape—two biographies, and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to
The Spectator and other journals, many of which appear in the late collection
Reflections. Most of his novels have been filmed, including
The Third Man, which the author first wrote as a film treatment. Graham Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of Merit among numerous other awards.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, 
John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cap

EAN: 9780142437971

Package Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches

Languages: English