 On this day in 1962 Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was published. Although many do not think it his best novel — the vote seems to go to Earthly Powers (1980) — A Clockwork Orange made Burgess internationally famous, largely due to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film and the controversy which arose concerning its violence and its missing last chapter. |
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Stories can empower teenage readers and challenge their parents and teachers, says Melvin Burgess.Books fulfil many roles – they can be comforting, they can be distracting, they can take us places we’d never normally go. But my favourite books, generally speaking, are empowering books – books that give us a little bit more understanding about the world, and ourselves in particular. Such books for children are not always comfortable for adults. Bringing up kids is a long process of letting go, and it’s easier to keep them on the rails, by and large, where we know what’s going on.
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By Tom Hawking
A while back, we surveyed a selection of cinema’s most notoriously “difficult” classics. This week, we got to thinking about literary equivalents, mainly because of the news that to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 169 artists are creating their own versions of the mysterious illustration that adorns p. 169 of the book’s third volume. We’ve come up with a selection of other novels that have been acclaimed as classics and that we find largely incomprehensible — none of them have been bewildering readers for quite as long as Tristram Shandy has, but they’re doing their best to make up for lost time. We’re big fans of some of these novels, by the way (although not all of them) — but love them or hate them, they’re all confusing as hell.
Previously unheard showtunes composed by author Anthony Burgess are said to recall West Side Story.
By Sean Michaels
The droogs don't work ... Still from A Clockwork Orange (1971). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Songs from a musical adaptation of A Clockwork Orange are to be performed for the first time next year. Written by author Anthony Burgess, the ultraviolent showtunes will premiere in Manchester next summer.
Burgess, who died in 1993, started working on a stage version of A Clockwork Orange a decade after Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 film adaptation. “The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his ownership of the story,” Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, told BBC News. Although the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered a production based on Burgess’s script in 1990, his songs were replaced with compositions by U2′s Bono and The Edge.
Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange.
By Stephen Bates
At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born.
The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993.
Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects.
