Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it."—Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Finally in paperback after six hardcover printings, this international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.

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Unreliable Memoirs

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Unreliable Memoirs

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A best-selling classic around the world, Clive James’s hilarious memoir has long been unavailable in the United States.

Before James Frey famously fabricated his memoir, Clive James wrote a refreshingly candid book that made no claims to be accurate, precise, or entirely truthful, only to entertain. In an exercise of literary exorcism, James set out to put his childhood in Australia behind him by rendering it as part novel, part memoir. Now, nearly thirty years after it first came out in England, Unreliable Memoirs is again available to American readers and sure to attract a whole new generation that has, through his essays and poetry, come to love James’s inimitable voice.

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The Blaze of Obscurity: Unreliable Memoirs V

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"Clive James on TV" is now in book form. For many people, Clive James will always be a TV presenter first and foremost, and a writer second - this despite the fact that his adventures with the written work took place before, during and after his time on the small screen. Nevertheless, for those who remember clips of Japanese endurance gameshows and Egyptian soap operas, Clive reinventing the news or interviewing Hefner and Hepburn, Polanski and Pavarotti, Clive's 'Postcards' from Kenya, Shanghai and Dallas, or Clive James Racing Driver, Clive's rightful place does seem to be right there - on the box, in our homes, and almost one of the family. However you think of him, though, and whatever you remember him for, "The Blaze of Obscurity" is perhaps Clive's most brilliant book yet. Part "Clive James on TV", it tells the inside story of his years in television, shows Clive on top form both then and now, and proves - once and for all - that Clive has a way with words...whatever the medium.

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Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008

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“A generous helping of [James’s] very best, guaranteed to lift the spirit and raise the eyebrow.”—Billy Collins

Opal Sunset marks the exuberant introduction of Clive James’s poetry to an American audience.

Praised after the publication of Cultural Amnesia as one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, Clive James is now, with the publication of this collection, being granted recognition as the poet he has always been.

For much of his long career it was hard to realize that James’s gift for poetry underlay his achievements in other fields. First as a television critic on Fleet Street, and later as a television personality in his own right, he achieved such fame for writing the way he spoke that his poetry was regarded as an idiosyncratic sideline, as if no celebrity could write worthy verse. A conundrum presented itself: how could a serious poet also be a television star? But for James, a duty to the discipline of verse was always fundamental, and his accumulated poetic output became impossible to ignore.

As early as the 1970s, James’s long, mock epic “Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World” received almost unprecedented attention in his adopted England, while later, his satirical short poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” became not only a standard verse quoted at fancy dinner parties but entered the culture as lines to be memorized by unpublished writers everywhere. James was suddenly in the odd position of having written famous poems well before he became a famous poet. Finally, the publication of a volume of his collected verse, The Book of My Enemy, earned him in 2003 the reputation as a serious poet that he has long deserved.

Less inhibited by fixed categories, a new generation of critics has confirmed what James’s public has instinctively known, that he brings his poems to life with all the resources to be found in his prose: wit, imagination, social observation, and a dazzling play of language. In addition, his poems have an unmistakably characteristic rhythm that makes it compulsory to read them aloud. Switching between strict stanzas and free forms as the occasion suits, James brings a compulsively readable coherence to either mode; and always, over and above the binding force of his metrical assurance, there is a lyricism that brings even the plainest statement to extra life, and which often enters deeply into realms of human emotion. His later poems about the tragedy that struck his mother and father, for example, show an intensity of regret that mark his maturity as a poet and bring out his unashamed nostalgia for his homeland, Australia.

Opal Sunset is a treasure chamber of epigrammatic jewels to which the reader will return again and again.

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Cultural Amnesia

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'A gigantic book on a gigantic theme' Sunday Times 'Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' J. M. Coetzee A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organized from A through to Z, and containing over 100 essays, it's the ultimate guide to the twentieth-century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it's a book for our times and, indeed, for all time. 'Clive James is one of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. If the dipper occasionally brings up exasperation, it brings up astonished delight far more often; and, best of all, exasperated astonished delight' Boston Globe

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