From the author of THE FOWLER FAMILY BUSINESS comes a reissue of his infamous, intensely distilled epic, POMPEY.  This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen.  Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent.  The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. POMPEY is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our most viciously inventive writer -- part hallucinatory adventure, part unhappy family saga, part perverse tragedy of the fundamentalist delusion, it is persistently, hurtfully entertaining. And it includes footnotes. Heed the author's warning: 'After using this book please wash your hands.' That way you'll cleanse the stain of corruption, the reek of life as it's really lived (in Meades's fervid imagination).

Pompey

MEADES, JONATHAN

Fourth Estate Ltd.

These short stories mark the start of a brilliant and black literary career. A dog who stars in bestial pornographic movies describes the slippery slope towards aniseed addiction in 'Fur and Skin'. 'The Sylvan Life' is a story of rustling, hallucinogenic mushrooms and incest as they proliferate in the New Forest. In 'Spring and Fall' a rich and childless woman offers a sybaritic young boy a clandestine family life which becomes his downfall. The most extraordinary circumstances combine to provide the perfect alibi for a homosexual 'crime passionnel' in 'Oh So Bent', 'The Brute's Price' demonstrates the inadvertent steps an innocent man may take in bringing himself under suspicion of heinous murders on Portland. An injection of the criminal element into the pretensions of suburban Surrey provides the squalid drama of 'Rhododendron Gulch'. In the title story a relentlessly pedantic urge of a lexicographer to discover why his surname is a slang word for 'foot' leads him to a nightmarish revelation. Jonathan Meades has a black imagination. Not content with disarming his readers an outrageous premise, he continues to tease their curiosity from one end of each story to the other. His is the kind of originality that comes along rarely, his characters the sort who lurk and linger round the back alleys of the mind.

Filthy English

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Harpercollins Pb

A highly collectible first edition protected in a new brodart wrapper, not price clipped, an ex-lib or book club edition, no markings throughout.\n\nFrom the author of THE FOWLER FAMILY BUSINESS comes a reissue of his infamous, intensely distilled epic, POMPEY. This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen. Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent. The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. POMPEY is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our most viciously inventive writer -- part hallucinatory adventure, part unhappy family saga, part perverse tragedy of the fundamentalist delusion, it is persistently, hurtfully entertaining.

POMPEY.

Contemporary

CAPE. LONDON 1993

This book is the work of 15 years of weekly restaurant columns in The Times and over 100 weeks spent in provincial British hotels. Jonathan Meades has tried everything and everywhere once and this book is the record of that gravy-stained odyssey. It isn't always pretty but it is the authoritative record of the alleged British gastronomic revolution of the past 20 years. But much more than that, this is a treasure trove of Meades's singular and audacious prose, a heady mix of acute social observation, architectural and topographical commentary, deep satirical humour, and an unshakeable commitment to telling the truth, whatever the consequences.

Incest and Morris Dancing

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

Cassell

Peter Knows What Dick Likes

HarperCollins, Publishers

Views more than five thousand years of architecture by examining great buildings and monuments from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the Pompidou Centre--built in Paris during the 1970s

Illustrated Atlas of the World's Great Buildings

Arts & Photography

Bagenal, Philip

Architecture

Salamander Books Ltd.

Black and white illustrations throughout. Nicholas Campbell, Rex Wilkinson, Roger Zogolovitch and Piers Gough studied together at the Architectural Association in London between 1965 and 1971. This book documents early projects such as Smithfield Lofts, Radio City, Lonsdale Studios, Black Eagle Wharf, the Gilbert Exhibition, and more. Measures 8.5 inches square.

'English Extremists : The Architecture of Campbell Zogolovitch Wilkinson Gough (A Blueprint Monograph)

Campbell, Zogolovitch, Wilkinson, Gough

Heinz Gallery

David&Charles

Pidgin Snaps: A Boxette

Unbound

Museum Without Walls

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent 30 sales and marketing years constructing 60 films, two novels, and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and "the gaps between them," drawing attention to what he calls "the rich oddness of what we take for granted." This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls "heavy entertainment"—strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.

Essays & Correspondence

At first glance, Jonathan Meades's 1993 masterpiece Pompey is a post-war family saga set in and around the city of Portsmouth. This doesn't come close to communicating the scabrous magnificence of Meades's vision. He writes like Martin Amis on acid, creating an obscene, suppurating vision of an England in terminal decline. The story begins with Guy Vallender, a fireworks manufacturer from Portsmouth (Pompey), who has four children by four different women. There's Poor Eddie, a feeble geek with a gift for healing; "Mad Bantu," the son of a black prostitute, who was hopelessly damaged in the womb by an attempted abortion; Bonnie, who is born beautiful but becomes a junkie and a porn star; and finally Jean-Marie, a leather-wearing gay gerontophiliac conceived on a one-night stand in Belgium. The narrator is "Jonathan Meades," cousin to Poor Eddie and Bonnie, who tells the story of how their strange and poisonous destinies intersect. And although there is no richer stew of perversity, voyeurism, corruption, religious extremism, and curdled celebrity in all of English literature, there is also an underlying compassion and a jet-black humor which makes Pompey an important and strangely satisfying work of art. Prepare to enter the English novel's darkest ride.

Pompey: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

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