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Even the tragic dramatist remains a clown, blowing a sad tune on a battered trombone. Macbeth thinks one thing and Macduff a thing diametrically opposed to it the King’s ideas are not Hamlet’s. And when the characters start to think, and express their thoughts, these are not necessarily the writer’s own. Indeed, it is hard to know what the imaginative writer really does think, since he is hidden behind his scenes and his characters. No creator of plots or personages, however great, is to be thought of as a serious thinker-not even Shakespeare. The President of the United States uses words, the physician or garage mechanic or army general or philosopher uses words, and these words seem to relate to the real world, a world in which taxes must be levied and then avoided, cars have to be run, sicknesses cured, great thoughts thought and decisive battles engaged. His use of words is not to be taken too seriously. He mimes, he makes grotesque gestures, he is pathetic or comic and sometimes both, he sends words spinning through the air like colored balls. He is a mere entertainer, a sort of clown. The novelist passes the time for you between one useful action and another he helps to fill the gaps that appear in the serious fabric of living. Moreover, it is not a useful trade, as is that of the carpenter or the pastry cook. Novelists put dirty language into the mouths of their characters, and they show these characters fornicating or going to the toilet. It is, I think, a harmless trade, though it is not everywhere considered a respectable one. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.I am by trade a novelist. A newly revised text for 'A Clockwork Orange'' s 50th anniversary that brings the work closest to Burgess' intentions.

We publish this landmark edition with its original British cover and six of Burgess s own illustrations.

Andrew Biswell, PhD, director of the International Burgess Foundation, has taken a close look at the three varying published editions alongside the original typescript to recreate the novel as Anthony Burgess envisioned it. A nightmare vision of the future told in its own fantastically inventive lexicon, it has since become a classic of modern literature and the basis for Stanley Kubrick s once-banned film, whose recent reissue has brought this revolutionary tale on modern civilization to an even wider audience. A Clockwork Orange is as brilliant, transgressive, and influential as when it was published fifty years ago.