Kipling's Choice


Book Description

Now available in paperback, this moving historical novel examines the lost days of Rudyard Kipling's son, John who was killed in his first battle of World War I.







A Choice of Kipling's Prose


Book Description

"As a short-story writer, Rudyard Kipling is equaled only by Chekhov -- and this unusually generous selection, intended as a companion volume to T. S. Eliot's A Choice of Kipling's Verse, will undoubtedly confirm Kipling as a great master. Kipling has never wanted for advocates. The list includes George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, as well as Eliot. But Craig Raine, in his original and meticulous introduction, offers a fresh overview of the work, as well as detailed readings of particular stories." -- Back cover.







Quest for Kim


Book Description

This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here retraces Kim's footsteps across Kipling's India to see how much of it remains. To attempt this with a fictional hero would normally be pointless. But Kim is different. For much of this Great Game classic was inspired by actual people and places, thus blurring the line between the real and the imaginary. Less a travel book than a literary detective story, this is the intriguing story of Peter Hopkirk's quest for Kim and a host of other shadowy figures.




The Letters of Rudyard Kipling: 1911-19


Book Description

The fourth volume of Rudyard Kipling's letters, now collected and edited for the first time, continues the story of his life from the end of the Edwardian era through the Great War, a crisis in Kipling's life as well as in that of the world. The years before the war saw the publication of Rewards and Fairies and Songs from Books. In politics, the great issue was Irish home rule and the fate of Ulster. At the outbreak of the war Kipling devoted himself to the struggle. He wrote patriotic verse, made recruiting speeches, and traveled as a correspondent to the French and Italian fronts. He published no new fiction, only what he wrote as correspondent and propagandist: France at War, The Fringes of the Fleet, and The Eyes of Asia. In 1915 his only son, John, was killed in the Battle of Loos; at the same time Kipling began to suffer from the undiagnosed ulcer that would torment him for the rest of his life. His last volume of poems, The Years Between, published in 1919, embodies the suffering and bitterness of these years.




If -


Book Description




If


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world. At the height of his fame in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner. His influence on major figures—including Freud and William James—was pervasive and profound. But in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny. In If, scholar Christopher Benfey brings this fascinating and complex writer to life and, for the first time, gives full attention to Kipling's intense engagement with the United States—a rarely discussed but critical piece of evidence in our understanding of this man and his enduring legacy. Benfey traces the writer’s deep involvement with America over one crucial decade, from 1889 to 1899, when he lived for four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, and sought deliberately to turn himself into a specifically American writer. It was his most prodigious and creative period, as well as his happiest, during which he wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. Had a family dispute not forced his departure, Kipling almost certainly would have stayed. Leaving was the hardest thing he ever had to do, Kipling said. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he lamented, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.” In this fresh examination of Kipling, Benfey hangs a provocative “what if” over Kipling’s American years and maps the imprint Kipling left on his adopted country as well as the imprint the country left on him. If proves there is relevance and magnificence to be found in Kipling’s work.




The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling


Book Description

Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realized world of the 'Indian' stories that made his name, through the experimental modernism of his middle period to the highly-wrought subtleties of his later pieces. Including the tale of insanity and empire, 'The Man Who Would Be King', the high-spirited 'The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat', the fable of childhood cruelty and revenge 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', the menacing psychological study 'Mary Postgate' and the ambiguous portrayal of grief and mourning in 'The Gardener', here are stories of criminals, ghosts, femmes fatales, madness and murder.