The Garden of Eros brings to life some of last century’s leading cultural figures, who shaped our modern thinking and defined the tastes of an entire generation, changing for ever the way we look at literature and the world around us. Drawing from the accounts of two fellow publishers Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset, who were also active in the heady days of 1950s and 1960s Paris, London and New York and from his own personal recollections, John Calder talks about the challenges of bein...

“Publish and be damned”, Wellington’s famous adage, runs like a leitmotiv through John Calder’s memoirs. He has been damned by a censorious press, by politicians, by other publishers and by organs of the state for publishing books on sensitive issues. Damned also for publishing such authors as Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi and Hubert Selby Jr, as well as for bringing to public notice the abuses of the armies and security forces of colonial countries. He took on America...

Increasingly Samuel Beckett’s writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare’s in the late Renaissance. John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject’s thinking that othe...

John Calder's new poetry collection, 'Solo', avoids strict poetic forms in favour of a casual and natural expression of thought. Honest in its pessimism, the tone is often questioning, and some of the biggest issues, such as politics and war, are not shirked.

Like all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it extensively in his novels, plays and poetry. Beckett's works also explored philosophy and the imaginative world of Dante and Milton, as well as the theories of Darwin and scientific speculation,...