LITMIR.BIZ

Introduced by Margery Palmer McCulloch.
In writing Just Duffy, a novel set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, Robin Jenkins has created a modern-day Confession of a Justified Sinner. Convinced of his own rectitude, appalled at the moral squalor around him, Duffy declares war on society. Ridiculous, yet horrifying at the same time, his campaign builds to a terrifying conclusion. Beset with ambiguity, Duffy is a ferocious indictment of Calvinistic moral certainty, of a struggle for good which results in only evil and destruction. The deeply ironic title bears witness to the mismatch of Duffy’s aspiration against his own insignificance.
The themes of this novel are central to all Jenkins’ work. In its stark simplicity Just Duffy lays claim to being one of his most significant and powerful novels. Its inexorable drive and power bear witness to a modern Greek tragedy played out on a Scottish stage.
‘Challenging and absorbing . . . a powerful and mordant irony.’ Scotsman
‘Stark and hypnotically well written.’ Irish Independent
‘Robin Jenkins is the most outstanding novelist that Scotland has produced since the war.’ Compton Mackenzie

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Foreword by David Daiches with an additional essay, ‘Promised Lands’.
In this captivating autobiography of his childhood and student years David Daiches recalls a unique period between the two world wars. There was something very special about the Scottish-Jewish interchange in those years. It has had its counterparts in other cultures yet few have been captured so vividly or with such insight peculiar to the very young.
Daiches was one of the sons of Edinburgh’s chief Rabbi. In their home, a quiet dark hub of foreign faith, memories of light and festivity predominated. Illustrious visitors from every corner of the globe would call on the distinguished Rabbi and the sons of the house would argue cheerfully with these itinerant scholars and diplomats.
School was Scottish, Presbyterian, with its characteristics smell of wood, chalk, ink and schoolbag leather. Daiches did not play games, sing hymns, wear the ubiquitous school shorts or socialise after school yet not only did he survive these tribulations, he excelled. ‘The two cultures of my childhood . . . I was equally at home in both. That was my good fortune and I have never ceased to be grateful for it.’
‘Promised Lands’ is a moving memoir of the author’s father and a timely meditation on exile, pluralism and synthesis, and on the need to welcome and also to balance the vital cultural differences which show us what we are and how we all belong to the imagined community of Scotland.

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This selection of J M Barrie's work covers three different genres and all the most telling themes found in his writing: Scotland, childhood, fantasy and sentimentality, sexual anxiety, theatrical invention, social comedy and proto-feminism.
The disturbing prose fable of The Little White Bird contains the first and most original exploration of the Peter Pan theme, properly set in the wider context of a middle-aged man's engagement with creation, fantasy and loneliness-a theme which made Barrie world-famous and haunted him for the rest of his life.
In a one-act play of scintillating satire, The Twelve-Pound Look exposes the pomposities of male pride and public success in 1910 from the point of view of an ex-wife unexpectedly returned as her (be)knighted husband's typist.
Written in diary form and telling of an uncanny romance in a remote winter glen, Farewell Miss Julie Logan evokes the author's fascination with longing, death and loss in a novella which can stand with the stories of the supernatural and which itself raises questions about the nature of romance fiction.
This volume offers an exciting reassessment of one of Scotland's most unusual and misrepresented writers.

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This extraordinary work is at one and the same time an account of a personal spiritual crisis and a hilarious spoof on academic learning, early Victorian values and materialism. In Sartor Resartus (‘the tailor retailored’) a fictitious editor retells the theories of an equally fictitious German professor who has come to the conclusion that human institutions and morals are only clothes to shield us from nothingness, clothes that can be changed as the whims of the age or fashion dictate.
This radically deconstructive vision reveals the very highest symbols of belief for what they are – merely symbols. How to believe in anything after such an insight is a question even more acute today than it was in Carlyle’s time, when he first asked it in this masterpiece of invention, parody and profound laughter.
This Canongate Classics edition incorporates illustrations by Edmund Sullivan, reproduced as they appeared in the 1898 edition of the text. Also included is the notable Emerson preface to the original American edition and an incisive, specially commissioned introduction from Alasdair Gray.
‘The character of his influences is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their minds.’ George Eliot

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Haunted by a sense that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a narrow and disputed borderland, the tales that Margaret Oliphant liked to call her 'stories of the seen and the unseen' are now recognised as among the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times.
A prolific writer with many novels to her name, Margaret Oliphant could produce her few supernatural tales 'only when they came to me'. And they came with the twilight uncertainties and the philosophical depth of 'The Library Window', or with the extraordinary vision of purgatory imagined as modern city life mixed with metaphysical terror in 'The Land of Darkness' or in A Beleaguered City, her extraordinary short novel of the returning dead.
Like the old Scottish ballads where the dead and the living rub shoulders, these remarkable tales are among Oliphant's finest work, mixing the subtlety of Henry James with the uncanny strangeness of George MacDonald or David Lindsay.

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