Boston Review Explores the Fantasy World of John Cowper Powys

Roger Boylan examines the life and work of John Cowper Powys in the new issue of The Boston Review, with a nod of praise to the recent biography published by The Overlook Press: "Today, the keeper of the flame is Dr. Morine Krissdóttir, a trained psychologist and Powys scholar (the two go together like bread and butter). She has written a fine biography of this controversial figure: Descents of Memory. A spell weaves its magic in the pages of Powys’s novels, and it hovers yet over Morine Krissdóttir’s splendid biography."

A.N. Wilson on DESCENTS OF MEMORY: A Life of John Cowper Powys

A. N. Wilson takes on the enigmatic John Cowper Powys in essay from The Spectator: "Morine Krissdóttir is a real authority on Powys. She has been studying him throughout a long life, she knows the material well and she has produced a book which no reader of Powys will want to be without." Krissdottir's biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, was released last Fall along with a new edition of Porius.

All the best, Frank Wilson

Our hat is off today to Frank Wilson, who retires today from his post as the venerable Book Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. One of the best and brightest in the book reviewing world, Frank was always a great supporter of Overlook and independent publishing. And, I wonder, if there's anyone in the U.S. who knows more about the great John Cowper Powys than Frank?

The New Yorker on DESCENTS OF MEMORY: The Life of John Cowper Powys

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory gets another fine notice: "The first comprehensive biography of John Cowper Powys, the author of “Wolf Solent” and “Porius,” reveals a man who saw himself as a magician and manipulator, to the occasional consternation of the family members and lovers who found themselves depicted in his writing. Born in Derbyshire in 1872, Powys was plagued by ulcers and possessed of a disastrous business sense, had various sexual preoccupations (he found the slender legs of young boys titillating), and tended to mythologize his own existence, ritually tapping his head on stones in attempts to communicate with Indian spirits. He was also incredibly prolific, drawing on his suffering and his obsessions to produce sprawling novels. Krissdóttir’s sympathetic immersion in the Powysian universe is balanced by a sharp critical engagement with Powys’s work, and she uses recently discovered correspondence and diaries to provide a fuller portrait of his relationship with Phyllis Playter, his longtime companion and amanuensis."

PORIUS Praised in Canada's GLOBE AND MAIL

The new Overlook edition of Porius, the monunmental novel by John Cowper Powys, is reviewed by Maggie de Vries, in The Globe and Mail:

"Powys achieves a striking balance of character, action and reflection. . . Equal to the exploration of religion and philosophy, Powys is concerned with all things male and female. Men and women connect in many configurations and with many different motives. Powys may not be a writer of the 21st century, but his men and women are not creatures of the 21st century, either. Just as Powys's characters' ruminations on the nature of good and evil allow for life's full complexity and variety, their struggles with power and sex and love do justice to life's infinite permutations.

It is interesting to consider Porius and its author in the context of several other writers who produced key works in those critical postwar years. While Powys was deep in writing Porius in his native northern Wales, to which he had returned after decades in the United States, T. H. White (1906-984) was writing the latter portions of The Once and Future King and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) were holed up in Oxford, hard at work on their own tales of the battle between good and evil. . . I would suggest that in this massive tome, Powys may have more of significance to offer us than Tolkien or Lewis or White. And perhaps that is why, after all these years, his book is being offered to us in its entirety."

Margaret Drabble Salutes JOHN COWPER POWYS in The Times Literary Supplement

Novelist Margaret Drabble has high praise for Morine Krissdottir's biography of John Cowper Powys, Descents of Memory, and Porius, in a lengthy essay in The Times Literary Supplement: "One can only help that this mythic masterpiece will now find the readers it deserves, for it is, as critics have argued, fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with Ulysses, while the biography, Descents of Memory, deserves to stand with Richard Ellman's James Joyce as a major work about a major artist."

More Praise for John Cowper Powys

Overlook's new edition of Porius is reviewed in this week's New Yorker: "The line between reality and reverie is not always clearly demarcated, and the epic number of characters is often bewildering, but the astutely envisaged world and the operatic romantic couplings quickly draw in the reader."

And the brilliant new biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, by Dr. Morine Krissdottir is the subject of a lengthy review ("The Dorset Proust") in The Literary Review: "An inspired study of the tangled and precarious life an absurdly neglected writer."

DESCENTS OF MEMORY: The Life of John Cowper Powys Reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer

Patrick Kurp reviews Morine Krissdottir's extraordinary biography of John Cowper Powys, Descents of Memory, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: "It's an odd thought, but I suspect readers of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake and J.K. Rowling might find something to their taste in Powys, particularly Porius.

An Appreciation of John Cowper Powys

Dr. Morine Krissdottir, author of Overlook's Descents of Memory: A Life of John Cowper Powys, blogs about acquiring a taste for the great writer in The Guardian this week. One of the great masterpieces of John Cowper Powys is his last novel Porius, which he considered "the chief work of my lifetime," and now available in a restored edition from Overlook under the careful direction of Dr. Krissdottir and co-editor Judith Bond. "Into it," writes Krissdottir, "he put a lifetime of reading and experience, of suffering and hope, then let it go free to be interpreted as it would."

John Cowper Powys: The Glastonbury Romanticist

The long awaited biography of John Cowper Powys, Descents of Memory by Morine Krissdottir, has just been released by The Overlook Press. This landmark work provides fascinating new details of the life of Powys, including his relationship with Phyllis Planter, the daughter of a Missouri businessman who was the writer's companion from 1923 until his death. The book also explores the life of Powys as an itinerant lecturer - he spent 25 years in America, touring the country, drawing enormous crowds to his public speeches. In today's review of the new biography in the New York Sun, Oxford Professor Paul Dean writes: "Powys was a spellbinding platform orator - at the end of one two-hour discourse on Hardy, a crowd of two thousand people rose to its feet, roaring for more . . ."

John Cowper Powys Profiled in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Descents of Memory and Porius are reviewed in George Gurley's profile of John Cowper Powys in The Wall Street Journal. In Descents of Memory, the first full-length biography of Powys, Dr.Morine Krissdottir offers a fascinating portrait of the forgotten genius of British letters. Porius is widely regarded as Powys's masterpiece, and now appears as it was originally intended by the author. Also available from The Overlook Press: A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower.

John Cowper Powys's PORIUS Now Available in Bookstores

Releasing this week in bookstores across the country is a new,
unabridged and carefully restored edition of PORIUS, by the
great John Cowper Powys. Kirkus Reviews notes that
"readers of all things Tolkien will find this epic a pleasure,
for it is full of Tolkienesque characters and interludes and
plenty of good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery stuff, all very
well told." Considered by Powys to be the "chief work of my
lifetime," PORIUS is a swirling, sweeping and challenging work
of genius, and might be appreciated by contemporary readers as
a masterpiece of magical realism. The new Overlook edition
checks in at 751 pages, with a Foreword by preeminent Powys
scholars Judith Bond and Morine Kridottir.