 First edition cover | |
| Author | Ian McEwan |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bill Botten |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
Publication date | 1975 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 165 |
| ISBN | 0-224-01095-6 |
First Love, Last Rites is a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. It was first published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape, with cover designed by Bill Botten, and re-issued in 1997 by Vintage.
The collection is McEwan's first published work and was regarded by the author (along with his second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets ) as an opportunity to experiment and find his voice as a writer. In an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, McEwan commented, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer." As a piece of work that portrays McEwan, the writer, at his youngest, it is perhaps fitting that the dominant theme is that of adolescence, of the blurry and perilous divide between childhood and adulthood; in addition themes of sex, perversion, and the grotesque in its many forms feature throughout.
The book is composed of eight short stories, with the title story coming seventh:
It has been suggested by any critics that as well as adolescence, the stories revolve around the difficulty of becoming a 'man,' whatever society deems a man to be. McEwan has described adolescents as "the perfect strangers," and through his use of first person narratives in this collection focuses on that difficult and often shocking transitional period.
First Love, Last Rites received the Somerset Maugham Award for 1976; coincidentally, McEwan's friend Martin Amis [2] [3] had been the previous author to receive the honour.
The collection was well received by critics. [4] In the Dictionary of Literary Biography , John Fletcher wrote, "Such writing would be merely sensational if it were not, like Kafka's, pointed, so accurate, so incapable indeed of being appalled. In contemporary writing one has to turn to French literature to encounter a similar contrast between the elegance of the language and the disturbing quality of the material; in writing in English McEwan is wholly unique." [5] Critic Robert Towers described McEwan's England in The New York Review of Books as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail"; Towers called the collection "possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set." [6]
In The New York Times , Michael Mewshaw stated that "even the most measured plot synopsis may make these stories sound sensational or slightly psychopathic [...] But what sounds lurid and macabre in summary comes across on the page as poignant and often appealing. This is a tribute to Ian McEwan, a young British writer who has an extraordinary talent for humanizing potentially unpalatable characters." While Mewshaw argued that central characters in "Homemade" and "Conversation with a Cupboard Man" were literary and sophisticated to an extent that was incompatible with their situations, Mewshaw also wrote that the stories “indicate at once that [McEwan] is a writer of wit, imagination and incisiveness.” [7] An unfavorable write-up appeared in Kirkus Reviews , however, where the reviewer complained, "There are no elements of fine drawn invention and surprise here--only too literally does he manage to soil his hands. [...] Provocation of a sort, but is it really justified by such an overwhelming fetor?" [8]
David Malcolm stated in 2002 that "Cocker at the Theatre" is "perhaps the weakest of the stories" [9] but referred to the others as "rather detailed and painstaking evocations of mood and feeling, of desire, shame, uncertainty, distaste, and confusion." [10] Lucas Wittmann of The Daily Beast listed the collection in 2010 as one of McEwan's stronger pre-Atonement works along with his other short story collection, arguing, "In all of these stories lie the essence of McEwan's fictional vision, and for any fan of his work this is the place to start to understand how he has evolved as a writer even while he's never quite given up on finding humanity and dark humor in our collective foibles." [11] Conversely, Sandra Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail that McEwan had evolved as an artist since his early works and that First Love, Last Rites is among the books in which the author is a "literary shocker" rather than an "innovative and compassionate novelist", likening it to punk rock. [12]
The title story was adapted for a 1997 film of the same name. The film stars Natasha Gregson Wagner as Sissel and Giovanni Ribisi as Joey. It was directed by Jesse Peretz.
"Butterflies" has been adapted twice for cinema. In 1988 by Wolfgang Becker under the German title Schmetterlinge and in 2005 by Max Jacoby under its original English title.
"Solid Geometry" was also adapted by Channel 4 in 2002 into a short film of the same name. This adaptation was directed by Denis Lawson and stars Ewan McGregor as Phil and Ruth Millar as Maisie.
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986).
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize. Amis served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury, was an English author and academic.
The Cement Garden is a 1978 novel by Ian McEwan. It was adapted into a 1993 film of the same name by Andrew Birkin, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson. The Cement Garden has had a positive reception since its original publication.
Atonement is a 2001 British metafictional novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
The James Bond Dossier (1965), by Kingsley Amis, is a critical analysis of the James Bond novels. Amis dedicated the book to friend and background collaborator, the poet and historian Robert Conquest. Later, after Ian Fleming's death, Amis was commissioned as the first continuation novelist for the James Bond novel series, writing Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham. The James Bond Dossier was the first, formal, literary study of the James Bond character. More recent studies of Fleming's secret agent and his world include The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by the historian Jeremy Black.
Black Dogs is a 1992 novel by the British author Ian McEwan. It concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society. The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Critical reception was polarized.
In Between the Sheets (1978) is the second collection of short stories by British writer Ian McEwan.
Solid Geometry is a 2002 short TV film directed by Denis Lawson and starring his nephew Ewan McGregor and Ruth Millar. It is based on a short story by Ian McEwan published in collection First Love, Last Rites. It was made for the Scottish Television/Grampian Television New Found Land series, first shown by them on 3 October 2002. Co-financed by Channel 4, it was subsequently shown by them on 28 November 2002. Production on an earlier BBC adaptation was halted at a late stage in 1979.
The Comfort of Strangers is a 1981 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It is his second novel, and is set in an unnamed city. Harold Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for a film directed by Paul Schrader in 1990, which starred Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren and Natasha Richardson. The film is set in Venice.
South of No North is a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, originally published in 1973 as South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. South of No North also is a play that debuted off-Broadway in 2000 based on nine stories from the book.
Heavy Water and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories by Martin Amis. It was first published in 1998 by Jonathan Cape.
The Daydreamer is a 1994 children's novel by British author Ian McEwan. Illustrated by Anthony Browne. The novel was first published by Jonathan Cape. It draws its plot directly from the Rankin/Bass movie, The Daydreamer (1966) in which a young boy daydreams and enters a world of Hans Christian Andersen stories. It is considered to be McEwan's first book for children, or second if taking into account the picture book Rose Blanche (1985). Critics praised McEwan's imagination, but noted that the book had high "sweetness-and-light levels".
Sweet Tooth is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 21 August 2012. It deals with the experiences of its protagonist, Serena Frome, during the early 1970s. After graduating from Cambridge she is recruited by MI5, and becomes involved in a covert programme to combat communism by infiltrating the intellectual world. When she becomes romantically involved with her mark, complications ensue.
The Zone of Interest is the fourteenth novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2014. Set in Auschwitz, it tells the story of a Nazi officer who has become enamored with the camp commandant's wife. The story is conveyed by three narrators: Angelus Thomsen, the officer; Paul Doll, the commandant; and Szmul Zacharias, a Jewish Sonderkommando.
Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration is a television play written by Ian McEwan and directed by Mike Newell, part of the Second City Firsts series recorded by the BBC at Pebble Mill and broadcast on 10 April 1976. McEwan wrote the play in 1974, just after completing his first book, First Love, Last Rites, a collection of short stories and he regards it as belonging to that collection.
Nutshell is the 14th novel by English author and screenwriter Ian McEwan published in 2016. It retells William Shakespeare's play Hamlet from the point of view of an unborn child, and is set in 2015.
First Love, Last Rites is a 1997 American romantic drama film directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribisi. It is based on the short story of the same name by Ian McEwan and centers on the passionate love affair between a young couple over one Louisiana summer.
First Love, Last Rites is 1975 short-story collection by Ian McEwan.
