Recent
&Forthcoming Books
by and about Mervyn Peake
Coming
from Carcanet in June 2008:
Mervyn
Peake’s Collected Poems
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Published
in December 2007 by Peter Owen
(the publisher of both Peake’s Book
of Nonsense and Peter Winnington’s biography of
Peake, Vast
Alchemies, as well as Mervyn Peake: the Man and his Art mentioned
below),
Boy
in Darkness and other stories
Contains all Peake’s
shorter fiction: “Boy in Darkness” and his five short stories, along
with
40 paintings and drawings by Peake in colour and black & white, many
of them previously unseen.
£9.95 ISBN 978-0-7206-1306-3
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“The most wonderful book in the world”
Click on the image to see a pdf of the full cover of this book.
This
large volume (11 x 9 inches, more than 200 pages) in full colour called Mervyn
Peake: the Man and his Art was published by Peter Owen on 3rd October
2006, at £35.
It
contains about three hundred reproductions of paintings, drawings and illustrations
by Peake, chosen by Sebastian Peake and Alison Eldred, as well as essays on his
life and work. Contributors include Joanne
Harris, John Howe (whose essay can be read here),
Michael Moorcock, and half-a-dozen others. Peter Winnington edited the book and
wrote several of the chapters.
The book was very well received; the European edition of Time magazine devoted a whole page to it in the issue dated 11th December 2006, The Week named it as one of its favourite non-fiction books of the year, and it was the top-selling book in its category at Christmas 2006.
“A
magnificent book”
The July 2007 issue of Booklist (the monthly
journal of the American Librarians’ Association) opined that “Peake
seems ever about to be vaulted into the front rank of 20th-century English artists.
This marvelous album, focused on his artwork, may do the trick.” After praising
the “seven technically revelatory biocritical chapters” of the book,
the starred review concludes: “As rewarding to the intellect as to the eye,
this is a magnificent book.”
Locus listed Mervyn Peake: the
man and his art among the ten best art books of the year – and has just
announced that it is one of the five titles .
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Click
on the image to see the full cover of this book.
Peter
Winnington’s study, The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake’s
imagination, was also published on 3rd October 2006 (by Liverpool University
Press, distributed by Chicago
University Press in the USA). It is available in both hardback
and paperback.
Tom
Shippey (Professor, Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities, at St Louis University)
writes:
Mervyn Peake is the anomaly among fantasists: the illustrator who heard more than he saw, the playwright whose characters habitually reach for solitude and silence, creator, in the Gormenghast sequence, of an intensely-realized world of attics and cellars and peripheries. Peter Winnington’s The Voice of the Heart is the first study to take in Peake’s entire multi-generic work as a whole, and treats it with engagingly new and individual approaches. Peake has at last received the focused and undistracted attention he above all requires.
More information about this book is available on a separate page.