The Coming Day and Other Stories

by Upward, Edward

• ISBN13: 9781900564618
• ISBN10: 1900564610
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Enitharmon Press

Summary

These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward’s fiction still make a powerful impression.

Author Biography

Edward Upward (1903-2009) was the last of the ‘Auden generation’. While at Cambridge, he created with Christopher Isherwood a series of stories about the fictitious village of Mortmere. After graduating he was a private tutor and for thirty years a schoolmaster, until his retirement in 1961. His first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1938 and between 1962 and 1977 Heinemann published his trilogy The Spiral Ascent. Upward's The Railway Accident and Other Stories was a Penguin Classic. Enitharmon has been Upward's exclusive publisher from 1994, issuing a series of critically acclaimed stories as well as memoirs of Isherwood and Auden. Edward Upward died in 2009, at the age of 105 years.

Table of Contents

THE COMING DAY
a novella	11	(62)
THE SUSPECT
six short stories	73	(2)
The War Widow	75	(16)
Imaginative Men & Women	91	(8)
The Serial Dreamer	99	(11)
The Intangible Man	110	(13)
A Better Job	123	(16)
The Suspect	139