One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks has also published two acclaimed essay collections, Adultery and Other Diversions and Hell and Back. This new volume finds him as provocative and entertaining as ever. The title piece addresses D.H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterized by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett and Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongst others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Macchiavelli and the Medici. Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on the serious issue of World Cup football. Above all, these are essays whose ideas and themes call to each other in the most unexpected and ironic ways. From the wide variety of subjects emerges a consistent and convincing picture of a world that forever resists the writer's embattled attempts to wrap it up in language. Muscular and energetic, The Fighter is a wonderful display of engagement and judgement.
Author
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis. During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo. Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work. Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.
