Mr. Fortune (New York Review Books Classics)

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893-1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books) , appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book of- the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune's Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner's biographer Claire Harman, it "was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda" to Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it "the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote." Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warner's novel of the French Revolution of 1848.. ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993) . He writes about films and books for London newspapers.