One of the twentieth century's great undisputed masterpieces, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano includes an introduction by Michael Schmidt in Penguin Modern Classics.It is the fiesta 'Day of the Dead' in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac. In the shadow of the volcano, ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate, ugly pariah dogs roam the streets and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his...

"Lowry's masterpiece" about a fateful Day of the Dead in a small Mexican town and one man's struggle against the forces threatening to destroy him ( Los Angeles Times).In what the New York Times calls "one of the towering novels of [the twentieth] century," former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Gripped by alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage...

A quartet of the British novelist's finest works of fiction, including "Lowry's masterpiece," Under the Volcano ( Los Angeles Times).Malcolm Lowry was an author who poured his soul into his prose, including his struggle with his own demons. Of his most famous work, Under the Volcano, Dawn Powell wrote: "You love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding." In the New York Herald Tribune, Mark Schorer comme...

From the author of Under the Volcano: A novel of a young man's flight from the upper class to join the hard-living crew of a freighter bound for South Asia.In this debut novel by the acclaimed novelist and poet, Dana Hilliot seeks absolution from his wealthy British upbringing, escaping the bourgeois provincialism of his origins by setting out to sea as a messboy amid a crew of weathered, world-weary sailors. Lost somewhere between Singapore and Bombay, Hi...

Paradise proves fleeting in this engrossing tale of a married couple who tries to chase away the past by immersing themselves in natureEdited by Malcolm Lowry's widow and released more than a decade after his death, October Ferry to Gabriola is the sentimental story of two individuals striving for sanity, inspiration, hope, and purpose in the deep seclusion of the British Columbian forest. Once the couple finds a new home in the woods, their new, off-the-gr...

'Staring out at the river his agony was like a great lidless eye'In this stark, compelling and greatly autobiographical novella, Malcolm Lowry tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York. As Plantagenet commits himself to a Psychiatric hospital to suffer his recovery, Lowry writes with eloquent ferocity on the delusions of madness, and the true meaning of sanity.

In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.” After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatter’s shack, all that remained of In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after Lowry’s death did it become...

Malcolm Lowry, who would permanently stake his claim to literary immortality with the masterpiece Under the Volcano, wrote Ultramarine, his debut, as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Displaying the linguistic virtuosity and haunting imagery that became signatures of Lowry's mature style, Ultramarine, a novel he continually rewrote and revised from publication until his death, is one of his central works, and this new edition offers the opportunity for a fuller assessment of his place in t...

Seven stories and novellas by the author of Under the Volcano, a master of twentieth-century fiction.For fans of the novel Under the Volcano, this collection of stories—many of them published for the first time posthumously—provides great insight into the author's genius. The stories range from heartfelt tragedy to exuberant triumph. In the novella "Through the Panama," a burned-out, alcoholic writer tries to make sense of the literature that has ...

The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry’s exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay s...

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry.This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic...

On the Day of the Dead, 1938, former British consul Geoffrey Firmin is in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, where his life has become overshadowed by the debilitating malaise of drinking. His wife, Yvonne, has just arrived on a mission to rescue their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of a life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. But Yvonne’s mission is further complicated by the presence of the consul’s half-brother, Hugh, ...