The Powys Review

A collection of literary essays.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Mr Weston's Good Wine" by T. F. Powys. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Earth Memories is a wonderful collection of essays by the English writer Llewelyn Powys. These ‘love letters to the English Countryside’ manifest throughout great depth of nature lore and observation hand in hand with the author’s own personal pagan creed and commentary on places, people and things. This edition, which was first published in 1938, includes an Introduction by the American literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Van Wyck Brooks. “Wherever Llewelyn Powys has lived, his mind has always turned towards England, the homeland that haunts him like a passion. Under the stars in the African jungle, poring over Robert Burton, whose rhythms have left long traces in his style—a style that is often archaic and always rare in texture—he dreamed of English gardens. In New York, in the clattering streets, he would see the cuckoo perched singing on the top of Sandsfoot Castle. He can always regain serenity, he says in one of his essays, by thinking of the playground of his childhood, the pear trees of Montacute Vicarage. High as his fever may be, the memory of this enchanted ground quiets his pulse in a moment; and his pictures of England suggest the eye of the convalescent, as if the world had been reborn for him. They are full of an all but miraculous freshness.”—Van Wyck Brooks, Introduction

T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other—and Unclay is his masterpiece New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest. First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light—Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The village teems with the old virtues (love, kindness, patience) and the old sins (lust, avarice, greed). What unfolds is a witty, earthy, metaphysical, and delicious novel of enormous moral force and astonishing beauty.

Drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, author John Cowper Powys creates a striking collection of human oddities, through which he shows his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, the essential loneliness of human beings. “To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.”—Henry Miller.