Bøger af Doris Lessing

Der er næppe skrevet dybere og mere indfølende om katte, end Doris Lessing gør det i Katte især.Katte især er en erindringsbog skrevet med hjertet, men helt uden omsvøb. Siderne er fulde af livsbe­kræftende anekdoter og tragiske, til tider brutale, historier om kattene i forfatterindens liv. Der er barndommens katte på den afrikanske savanne, hvor livet i naturen leves farligt mellem slanger­ne på jorden og høgene i luften. Og vi møder den blågrå perserkat, den første store kærlighed, som en lungebetændelse gør ende på, og med hvilken alle senere katte måles og vurderes. Og så ikke mindst de bykatte, Lessing lever med som voksen i London. Katte især fortæller også Lessings egen historie, hvordan katte påvirker hende og hun dem, hvordan de lever sammen og kommunikerer i et sprog af humor og gestusser, som alle katteejere vil genkende.Doris May Lessing (1919-2013) er en britisk digter, dramatiker og romanforfatter. Lessing er kendt som en af de mest betydningsfulde engelske forfattere i moderne tid og blev tildelt Nobelprisen i litteratur i 2007. Ved tildelingen af prisen beskrev Det Sven­ske Akademi hende som “den kvindelige erfarings epiker, der med skepsis, ild og visionær kraft har gransket livet i en dybt splittet civilisation.” Hendes romaner er oversat til alverdens sprog og tæller blandt andre Græsset synger (1950), Den gyldne bog (1962), En overlevendes erindringer (1974), Den gode terrorist (1985) og science fiction-klassikeren Canopus i Argos: Arkiver (1979–1983). Katte især er fra 1967 og hendes måske mest elskede bog.Med efterord af Shëkufe Tadayoni Heiberg.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'.The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task.Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid.Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of 'The Grass is Singing' with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature.Set in Rhodesia, it tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush. Trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny brick and iron house, Mary, lonely and frightened, turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.A masterpiece of realism, 'The Grass is Singing' is a superb evocation of Africa's majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a passionate exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.

The landmark novel of the Sixties - a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer's block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook - the golden notebook - that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together.Widely regarded as Doris Lessing's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, 'The Golden Notebook' is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.

A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era and winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction.In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical and determined, she is also easily exploited by the group and ideal fodder for a more dangerous and potent cause. Eventually their naive radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, but the aftermath is not as exciting as they had hoped. Nonetheless, while they may not have changed the world, their lives will never be the same again ...

A collection of charming and celebrated writings about cats, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semi-feral creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination remained undiminished by the handsome domesticated creatures who shared her flats and her life in London and grew into real love with El Magnifico, the awkwardly lovable cat who in his later years suffered the great indignity of becoming a three-legged beast.Consisting of Lessing's celebrated collection of stories, 'Particularly Cats and Rufus', and the poignant though unsentimental memoir, 'The Old Age of El Magnifico', this book is a brilliant evocation of the feline world.

A classic tale from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child.'Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other's hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.'Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends - Harriet and David Lovatt's life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born, a sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable, the infant Ben, 'full of cold dislike', tears at Harriet's breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world ...

In Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about--though they are the real English. The cast of characters--if that term can be applied to real people--includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing's question "Don't you ever like sex?" with "If you're going to talk dirty, I'm not interested." In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliantpiece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

Novellix – Stor litteratur i et lille formatHvis hunden er menneskets bedste ven, er katten utvivlsomt forfatterens. Og læsernes! Og måske er det ikke så mærkeligt: elsket og gådefuld, som den er, udgør den ikke bare et fantastisk selskab; den er også en enestående karakter at bygge en historie omkring. Gennem katten ser vi os selv med nye øjne. I denne æske har vi samlet fire skildringer med afsæt i kattens væsen, skrevet af nogle af litteraturens største katteelskere. Den perfekte æske til alle som har kat, vil have kat, har haft kat – eller bare godt kan lide katte – og rigtig gode noveller!Æsken indeholder fire bøger: Suzanne Brøgger – Kejserinden Patricia Highsmith – Mings største bytte Angela Carter – Den bestøvlede kat Doris Lessing – El Magnificos alderdom

The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the piece are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

Long considered Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s best collection of short stories, African Stories—a central book in the work of a truly beloved writer—is now back in print. This beautiful collection is an homage to her twenty-five years spent in Africa and a brilliant portrait of African life.This is Doris Lessing’s Africa—where she lived for twenty-five years and where so much of her interest and concern still resides. Here in these stories, Lessing explores the complexities, the agonies and joys, and the textures of life in Africa. First published in 1965, and out of print since the 1990s, this collection contains much of Ms. Lessing’s most extraordinary work. It is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us—perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land. African Stories includes every story Doris Lessing has written about Africa: all of her first collection, This Was the Old Chief’s Country; the four tales about Africa from Five; the African stories from The Habit of Loving and A Man and Two Women; and four stories featured only in this edition. African Stories represents some of Doris Lessing’s best work—and is an essential book by one of the twentieth century’s most important authors.

"A keen sociological eye for class and ideology; an understanding of the contradictory impulses of the human heart; an ability to conjure a place, a mood and a time through seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York TimesShocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, Adore reaffirms Doris Lessing's unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.Roz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons--taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age.

Alfred and Emily is an intimate and revealing book by Doris Lessing, the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature and author of The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, that explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War.In this profoundly moving book, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, she imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the devastating global conflict."Here I still am," says Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.

In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous pyschological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.

"There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel." -- New York TimesSet in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses--master and slave--are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.

This wide-ranging collection of the stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate-spanning more than two decades of her astonishing career-highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world. Included are seminal stories like "To Room Nineteen," in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; "One off the Short List," which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry; "The Habit of Loving," in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious, young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy. Here are two classic novellas as well: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, which exemplify Lessing's grasp of the most essential human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background-the settings range across England and France-these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence, and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings.In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.In the last years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child--a boy--the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions?Mara's daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child-soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair?Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.

"A generous and pleasurable collection. . . . Vibrant and illuminating, with quotable lines on every page. . . . [Lessing is] a superb essayist: lucid, wise, knowledgeable, and witty."-- BooklistIn this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays span an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing's clear-eyed vision and clearly-expressed prose. But in its breadth and precision Time Bites is more: it is also a map of the human spirit and an intimate diagram of the mind of one of our greatest living writers.

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures with strange customs. Later, he is carried off on a cosmic journey into space...

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

"The life she describes is heroic...yet astonishingly full, with political work, writing, friendships, lovers and travel."? San Francisco ChronicleThe second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing's Sentimental Education.

In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.

This is the first volume in the series of novels Doris Lessing calls collectively Canopus in Argos: Archives. Presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, this purports to be a general study of the planet Shikasta-clearly the planet Earth-to be used by history students of the higher planet Canopus and to be stored in the Canopian archives. For eons, galactic empires have struggled against one another, and Shikasta is one of the main battlegrounds.Johar, an emissary from Canopus and the primary contributor to the archives, visits Shikasta over the millennia from the time of the giants and the biblical great flood up to the present. With every visit he tries to distract Shikastans from the evil influences of the planet Shammat but notes with dismay the ever-growing chaos and destruction of Shikasta as its people hurl themselves towards World War III and annihilation.

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.