Casts a humorous eye on the kingdom of Pisuerga and its citizens, King Willy, Her Dreaminess the Queen, His Weariness Prince Yousef, and the worried Laura de Nanzianzi

The Flower beneath the Foot

Firbank, Ronald

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Her ladyship languishes on the jaguar-skin sofa, robed in pyjamas; a negro boy roams the gold city streets, searching for a shabet but dreaming of butterflies; there, encased in a chasuble, his Eminence baptises the Duquesa DunEden. These are scenes from the novels featured in this collection.

Valmouth, Prancing Nigger, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Literary

Penguin Group USA

The cult favorite absurdist comedy by a writer who inspired Wilde, Forster, and Waugh The fairly young and entirely alive Mrs. Shamefoot wants nothing more than to have a memorial stained-glass window installed in her honor in an English cathedral. From this premise, the inimitable Ronald Firbank extends his witty, eccentric Vainglory, with a crowded cast of hilariously drawn characters—Winsome Brooks, Lady Anne Pantry, Miss Wookie, Mrs. Barrow of Dawn, and Mrs. Steeple, among others—a riot of parties, and a bottomless sense of the ridiculous. Firbank's fine comic skill, quick-fire dialogue, and descriptive flights of fancy are perfectly captured inVainglory, his first and longest novel, as well as in two novellas included here, Inclinations and Caprice. 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.

Vainglory: With Inclinations and Caprice (Penguin Classics)

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Classics

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Vainglory

Essays & Correspondence

Kessinger Publishing

For a specific description of this book, please see each individual seller offering.

The Early Firbank

Texas Bookman

The Complete Ronald Firbank

Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Valmouth

Duckworth

Prancing Nigger

Gerald Duckworth Co Ltd

“A person who dislikes Ronald Firbank," quipped W. H. Auden, "may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality, but I do not wish ever to see him again." Edmund Wilson pronounced him "one of the finest writers of his period." Part high camp comedy of manners and part fairy tale, Five Novels by Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) is introduced by Osbert Sitwell. Firbank lived a life of exquisite, if lonely, leisure. He composed all his novels on postcards in his countless hotel rooms, always lavish with flowers. His moves were impulsive––"Tomorrow I go to Haiti. They say the President is a Perfect Dear!" ran one telegram to a surprised friend. At a dinner party given in his honor, the pathologically shy author refused to consume anything more than a single pea. His no less eccentric creations, Parvula de Panzoust and her guest Eulalia Thoroughfare of Valmouth, dine on "salmis of cocks'-combs saignant with Béchamel sauce." In The Artificial Princess, a queen with a passion for motoring roars about her realm for hours with her crown on. The Flower Beneath the Foot, Prancing Nigger, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli are also included in this volume. "If only," concludes Sitwell, "we might have the joy of reading a new book from his pen, a book that would be so deliciously unlike any others in the world save his own." It is hoped that this collection will bring more readers that extraordinary experience.

Firbank: Five Novels

History & Criticism

New Directions

Three More Novels is a series of animated tableaux filled with beautiful, eccentric women pursuing pleasure in the most wicked, perverse, irresponsible ways, written by an extraordinary Englishman who dared to be as original in his books as he was in his life. So cleverly and wittily are the stories told that we sense we belong in the charmed café society of post-1918 Britain, and life seems, as Ernest Jones says in his critical introduction, "a Nirvana in which homosexuals are the ultimate chic and in which... almost everyone turns out to be at least bi-sexual." In Vainglory, Mrs. Shamefoot, who "almost compels a tear," embraces the quest for a cathedral stained-glass window "that should be a miracle of violet glass." In Inclinations, Miss Brookomore, filled with longing for her companion, the "sunny" Miss Mabel Collins, travels to Greece where Mabel, rather treacherously, acquires a husband and baby. And in Caprice, Miss Sinquier flees her rural parents and the comfort of her black slippers ("all over little pearls with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes") to pursue an acting career in bohemian London. To quote Mrs. Shamefoot describing a novelist clearly meant to be Firbank: “He has such a strange, peculiar style. His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way. If one should by chance turn about it’s usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to beckon. And they seldom really touch." Originally published in 1951, Three More Novels by Ronald Firbank is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook.

Three More Novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice (New Directions Paperbook)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Firbank, Ronald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Firbank, Ronald