Oscar Wilde Books

Mr. Oscar Wilde certainly fulfilled his end of the deal in uttering the wonderful words of wit contained in this small book.

Upon finding this book on display in a major bookstore, time flew by while I read through the whole miniature thing.

While walking up to the cashier to purchase it, however, I stopped dead in my tracks. Damn! The words on the back flap of the dust jacket read: "Printed in China."

I'm sure that Mr. Wilde would have some sharp words to say about a book of his work - words celebrating love of life and liberty - being produced in a country ran by a dictator - one that routinely uses either slave labor (in the form of "political" prisoners) or indentured servants (as in people who are not allowed to either quit or leave a job once taken) in their state-run industries.

I recommend Wilde's work wholeheartedly - but to purchase this tainted volume would certainly be unjust.

very good book. his talk about women is funny. His qoute all amke perfect sense....( i think.

Yes, this is a tiny book, but it is worth owning. Wilde has issued forth enough wonderful quotes to fill a much larger tome, but, that said, this is a nice novelty item. The diminutive book is packed with great photos of Wilde, the quotes that made him famous, as well as many quirky illustrations of the author.
Enjoy these quips from the man who uttered "either this wallpaper goes or I do" as his final words. I highly encourage you to also read Wilde's only novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

When I read A Woman of No Importance, I realized that I have read it before. Though, not by the same author. It is drastically similar to the French Play Le Fils Naturel, by Alexandre Dumas, jr. Though, it was a really nice play, it dragged in many places.

I've just started re-reading this play and I think it is one of the most beautiful works Wilde ever wrote. Mrs. Arbuthnot's speech at the end of Act Four, beginning "men don't know what mothers are" is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever read in Wilde. It's a very ironic speech, considering it was written by a man, but it shows what a wonderful insight into women Wilde had. The play is essentially about morality and the conflict between a person's own, private sense of morality and the moral values imposed on us by society. Ultimately, Mrs. Arbuthnot is the character who most deserves our respect, precisely because she refuses to buy into the moral values of those around her. Reading it, I can just imagine how it would be performed, I even find myself acting the play out in my head, such is the power and force of Wilde's dialogue. This is a truly beautiful work which I highly recommend

I received the news of the availability of this rarely seen or recorded early Wilde morality play with great joy; in reading along with it at home and pencilling out the many parts omitted by Mr. Jarvis (who also reads Lord Illingworth in a George Sands purr) I arose in outrage at the fraud.

We have come to expect in every recording of Oscar Wilde an undue amount of abridgement, from the BBC productions in The Oscar Wilde Collection (The Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan) whose most recommendable selection lies in his revelations concerning stock swindling and insider trading among the aristocracy in An Ideal Husband, despite its own abridgement, to the absolutely unwatchable Hollywood versions such as The Importance of Being Earnest (a Victorian woman receiving a posterior tattoo??) and An Ideal Husband.

Unfortunately Mr. Wilde is dimly misremembered and taught as light drawing room comedy and curious one liners, but this is not the case, as those were only a pretty icing upon a very deep and substantial cake of scathing and indeed revolutionary social commentary, as Mr. Wilde was a subversive and secret Irish nationalist using the British aristocracy's own language to undermine it, much as the Cherokee warrior Jimi destroyed a colonialist and anglo generation with their own rock and roll in vengeance for the brutal destruction of his own nation. But that is certainly another story for another day.

The reality of Wilde's opus clashes with our prejudices and thus we trim Mr. Wilde to fit our own poor misunderstanding. But most incomprehensible in this, Jarvis's present butchery of the Wildean substance is the loss of the well known and immortal line: "Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess."

The safest thing for properly understanding this play is to read it yourself, for instance, in the very convenient Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics).

We begin here with an abridged radio play presentation before a rather stiff and crusty live audience. The opening passages remind one of Kierkegard's famous reference to death by trampling by geese as we hear the indistinguishable squawks of women imagining they are producing the honking sounds of the British aristocracy of one hundred and a quarter years ago. Indeed the cacophony grows so profuse and confused that the abridger finds the need to not only excise the best of Wilde's social commentary, but also to insert inappropriately into the mouths of his characters the stage directions and other addresses in order to indicate who is speaking when and where. Sir John would never tell his wife (she of the many ex's) directly he preferred sitting with Lady Stutterfield (of the characteristic repetitious manner of speech). Please follow this with book in hand at all times in order to avoid wandering lost.

And these are not the only insertions, as Jarvis finds it necessary to add brutally the word Chicago where it is not indicated in the script, but only alluded to, as if we might not know now of the great Chicago Exhibition. He excises classical allusions the modern hearer might not have learned and thus would feel put out or looked down upon (Wilde had after all won prizes for classical studies throughout his educational career), as in the Archdeacon's reference to Dorcas, here exiled as now unknown. The archdeacon, by the way is the most listenable and talented of any of these actors. Jim Norton of the equally criminally abridged and overwrought recording of James Joyce's Ulysses (Abridged) here appears as the pretentiously preaching Kelvil, MP.

Jarvis's greatest crime of all is the alteration of the ending and the insertion there of the final word from Lord Illingworth, and the concurrent reversal of Mrs. Arbuthnot's response. If Jarvis wished to alter the ending, why not take up on the Lord's sincere offer to reform from the life he took up, lost after losing the lady of his love as she left him, and his sincere promise to treat Mrs. Arbuthnot with all due deference and respect and form a happy family with her and her son. That would be a modern ending satisfactory to all, if you must alter the ending, Mr. Jarvis.

Indeed, the overlooked mystery of this play is that the Lord is always pictured as the villian, yet he had indeed twenty years earlier offered to marry her, and his mother had indeed offered to support her, but she had fled, as she again does now, and yet she is the sympathetic character. What is Wilde telling us in a deeply inscrutable manner?

Please read this play in its entirety. At the time matters of child custody and single moms were not as common as now, and quite distractingly shocking, and so this play has much to tell us now. It is indeed a source of discussion for a great many moral and social and gender issues. Unfortunately Jarvis excises nearly all reference to the servants and their comings and goings and their direct mistreatment by the aristocracy, so all reference to class struggle is heard here only in pretty little speeches rather than in action.

In sum: READ THE BOOK!

As a satire on the spirit of Oscar Wilde, "The Green Carnation" is definite overkill. Hichens' own epigrammatism lacks the grace and subtlety of Wilde's wit and wisdom, and he drags wall-to-wall his assays into cleverness whether or not they are appropriate to develpment of the context. Disappointing.

I found the story and subtle yet obvious revelations of the green carnation to be a tantalising glimpse into the subtlety of sexuality in the eighteen hundreds. I recommend it as indolent, decadent and a complete delight for any one interested in an insight into the lives of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas.

A fun and easy read that is nevertheless considered a classic. The play's humor comes from exaggerated characters and their ridiculous lifestyles. The plot revolves around a silly love story, but really, this is a witty satire of the British upperclass of Wilde's day.

The drama of "The Importance of Being Earnest" was very displeasing to me. It bored me; it seemed too much of an intellectually witty comedy. All the jokes were engraved in the dialogue that I may have missed many times, even when I read it a second time. The different sexual innuendos were ok, but overall whatever comedy was there I didn't see, probably because this is an Old English comedy comparing to my modern day slapstick. The author bases all his comedy in the dialogue. The down-side is your so distracted by the dull character's conversations, you will miss it.
It takes place in England where everyone is sophisticated and everyone has money. The author has all the characters in dresses and suits and having intelligent conversations about love and lying. This drama will leave you frustrated as you struggle to understand and keep focus. It only heats up in the end when the main character is caught in his lie and tries to win back the situation. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is meant for the in-depth reader who can pick up on this. If you like "Our Town" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream", you will enjoy this. Otherwise, sleep on it.

I purchased this CD for my two older children (9 and 11), not sure how well it would go over. We listened to it for the first time in the car on a long trip. It was quite a giggle for everyone! We loved the comic points in the Canterville Ghost story, especially. Mr. Weiss's rendition of one of the characters had my husband and I in stitches - sounding just like Carol Channing.

I have since purchased 6 other Jim Weiss story CD's and my Girl Scouts have begun to request them when going on trips with the troop.

You won't be disappointed.

I'm a novice storyteller, and I was looking forward to finally hearing the renowned Jim Weiss, especially sharing spooky tales. He does an adequate job voicing the different characters, but I was disappointed at the lack of humor displayed at what could have been comical events. I now know these stories well enough to tell them better myself!

Great read, but it's the same book as another by the same author that is under a different title

this book is simply wrong. not just details, but the big picture. the anarchists weren't like that. the artists weren't like that. these people lived in a ferment of intellectual and moral commitment. i didn't feel the author was 'sensitive' to them at all: very much the opposite. i felt he was dismissive and patronizing.

this book is simply wrong. not just details, but the big picture. the anarchists weren't like that. the artists weren't like that. these people lived in a ferment of intellectual and moral commitment. i didn't feel the author was 'sensitive' to them at all: very much the opposite. i felt he was dismissive and patronizing.

There's a difference between nitpicking over minor historical innacuracies and making up nonsense out of whole cloth. This unfortunate book is of the latter sort. It's distorted by what the late Hal Draper called "falsifictions": self-invented statements uttered with an air of scholarly objectivity. The work will indeed transport one to another world: naturally so, because it isn't real.

Fortunately there are alternatives which are vivid, entertaining, and careful with the facts. Richard Ellmann and Barbara Belford have excellent, colorful biographies of Wilde. June Rose has a very fine biography of the fascinating Suzanne Valadon. Alexander Varias has a good account of the fin-de-siecle anarchists. Roger Shattuck has a truly superb book on the rich artistic ferment of la belle epoque, the 30 years or so before the first world war: "The Banquet Years". Shattuck's book is at once a definitive work of scholarship and a hugely fun read. Sweetman's is neither.

Incidentally Sweetman's bio of Gauguin suffers from the same tendency toward posturing. Whoops!, suddenly we're in the midst of detailed technical excursus into problems of large-scale engineering, or of epidemiology. (Gauguin tried to live in Panama at the time of the digging of the canal.) Is the author expert in these subjects? He certainly seems to want us to believe that he is. Nevertheless one doubts and, in doubting, questions his expertise on the subjects of art, literature and politics as well.

If you're looking for an entertaining experience from the pen of an expert, read Ellmann or Rose or especially Shattuck. Give Sweetman a rest.

I was able to read through chapter six before I lost all confidence in what the author was saying. his smug and shoddy treatment and inaccurate descriptions of suzanne valadon are mean-spirited enough to think the author carries some kind of personal agenda against tough and talented women. apparently, poor mr.sweetman became so distracted he got her maiden name wrong calling her marie-christine when her certified birth name is marie-clementine. this was irratating, but when I read page 166 I found it impossible to continue reading and trusting sweetman. sweetman has valadon's son, maurice utrillo, dying an early death on his "bad" mother's door step. maurice utrillo died in 1955. suzanne valadon died 1938. david sweetman must be the british version of america's [late] albert goldman. john e. nordin.

I should have read more of the other negative reviews. Very disappointed because this is NOT Oscar Wilde's version of The Happy Prince. Book arrived today - tossed today.

The art work is spectacular but the ending is such a disappointment when compared to the original work. Eliminating the heavenly reward creates a shallow ending in my opinion. I'm sending this version back and getting the original to give as a gift.
Some stories should just be left unedited. I think this is one of them.

This is my favorite story of all-time but I would never recomend buying a version that alters the ending. I am an agnostic and even I think it is beyond insane to remove the most beautiful/moving part of the story --

" 'Bring me the two most precious things in the city,' said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

'You have rightly chosen,' said God, 'for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.' "

While the lessons of compassion and charity are ones we'd all like to instill in our children, the story is dark and not appropriate for children at the lower end of the suggested age range. Not to give away the plot but, the happy prince gets melted down and the swallow dies. Their evententual reward, salvation (in the rescued from the scrap yard sense)and immortalization does not seem to be commensurate with their sacrifice. The subtleties were lost on my child. I didn't read the original Wilde so I can't offer a comparision.

It's been years since I read Wilde's The Happy Prince, so when I saw this sitting on the shelf at the library, I just had to check it out. Done in large, picture book style, Grodin's retelling of this classic children's tale is quite lovely. The book starts out with a bit about Wilde's life and ends with a page on homelessness and the virtue of "caring" which is nice, but well over the head or interest level of the children on the low end of the recommended age rage listed for this book (4-8), and though the story itself is fine for reading to children on the low end of the age range...my guess is that the subtleties of the message will be lost on most 4-5 year olds without adult prodding about the "lessons" of compassion and charity that this book has to offer. Still it's a classic and, I think a message worth giving and receiving.

Overall, The Happy Prince has never been a very "happy" book, that is to say, even in the original, the prince was melted down and the bird died...what's missing here is the bit where they get to go to heaven, chosen by one of God's angles as the two most precious things in the city. Grodin gave the book a more secular ending where the man charged with pitching them into the furnace decides they deserve better and buries them in the city center (presumably where the statue once stood), under a tree in a planter marked with the words compassion and kindness...so despite the loss of the direct Christian religious overtones of God and the virtues, Grodin manages to deliver the message of the original and I think that's wonderful. I give this version of The Happy Prince five stars, the text is lovely and the artwork is stunning and evocative of the story...at first dark and depressing and as the city becomes a happier, kinder, more compassionate place, it brightens and becomes lighter in look and feel.

Louis Edwards does a wonderful job of capturing the America of the late 19th century, particularly as seen through the eyes of Oscar Wilde. Using Wilde's actual lecture tour of America as the basis for his novel, Edwards captures the rhythm and tone of Wilde's speech and his commentaries are very much in character. It is through Edwards' preoccupation with Wilde's valet, Traquair that the novel comes up a bit short. As the story is told through Traquair, we have to participate in his "coming of age" tale, while Wilde proves to be the more fascinating character. Poor Traquair just isn't a strong enough a creation to stand up to Wilde's charisma and the novel suffers for it. I understand that Edwards felt he needed a focus for his work other than Wilde; perhaps concerned that Oscar might wear out his welcome over the course of the novel, but whenever Wilde left center stage I found my attention to Traquair's story wavering and I just couldn't wait for Wilde's reappearance.

This novel is actuallly not really about Oscar Wilde as much as it is about a black valet who accompanied him on his tour of America. The story is of an educated black man's discovery of himself in the late nineteenth century. I was intrigued by the concept, which is why I bought the book. Honestly, I didn't have much hope for the writing before I got into it but it was really pretty decent. Edwards to a very good job of capturing Oscar Wilde's quick wit and the characters are well developed. The feel of the time is about right, especially for the type of reaction an educated black man might get at that time.

My only disappointment was that I felt some of the dialogue was a bit overdone. Not so much as to ruin the novel, but at times it was a bit distracting.

On the positive side, Edwards does a good job with the structure of this novel, which has several complex parallel stories. Also, I think it was well researched - the author relied on numerous newspaper accounts of the time to capture the public enthusiasm and scepticism of Wilde's tour. Overall, it is a very worthwhile book. I will be looking for more from this author in the future.

The idea that Mr Wilde discovered America is clearly too absurd to warrant a novel which anybody will find plausible. This book is offensive to the descendants of Christopher Columbus. Mr Wilde never did anything of any note other than write some unfunny plays and get himself thrown in prison. Avoid.

What a great idea -- to focus on the black valet who accompanied Wilde on his great American speaking tour in the early 1880s. Edwards does a passable job explicating this premise, and in the process explores race and class relationships in America, as he takes the reader on a wild ride through late 19th Century America.

Don't buy this historical fiction if you want all Wilde, all the time, the story is really about the valet, a proud, handsome, educated free black who faced withering racism as Wilde's travels took them to the deep South.

It's a wild road novel that would make a fine movie.

This book is a step back in history narrated in the language of the times, which is quite realistic. It is told from a quite different viewpoint, not of Oscar Wilde, but beautifully described by his black valet who accompanied Oscar on his nationwide American tour. The book starts out in January 1882, as Oscar arrives in New York to begin his tour. At the time no mention was made in the press of his black valet named William Traquair, who accompanied him. As Wilde entertains the New World with his lectures and humor, Traquair enjoys what he will always remember as the best year in his life.

This is an engrossing and intriguing story that certainly gives us a much clearer perspective on what it must have been like in America at the turn of the century and especially what impact this time period had on black men.

A story that?s both fact and fiction, and one that will make you fantasize that you are right there on tour with Wilde and Traquair traveling across America at a time when life on this continent was so young and open to suggestion. I enjoyed this story and I feel the author has accomplished what he intended to do by taking us clearly back in time!

Joe Hanssen

The Case of the Pederast's Wife, by Blossom Elfman, is an incredibly well researched and written book. the first thing one notices is the quality of the writing and of the scholarship and research. Oscar Wilde was a complex and intereting character and until I read this quite marvelous book, I had no idea that he had a wife! He was, after all, an avowed homosexual. As one reads the book one comes to understand the restraints of the time Wilde and his wife, Constance, lived. Many books, plays and films have been written about Wilde, but Constance, his wife and mother of his two sons, has been neglected, even avoided. Applause and kudos to Ms. Elfman who had the intelligence and wit to discover Constance Wilde and to bring her to life in a wonderfully written book.

Oscar Wilde was one of the foremost representatives of Aestheticism, a movement based on the notion that art exists for no other purpose than its existence itself ("l'art pour l'art"), not for the purpose of social and moral enlightenment. Born in Dublin and a graduate of Oxford's Magdalen College, he initially worked primarily as a journalist, editor and lecturer, but gradually turned to writing and produced his most acclaimed works in the six-year span from 1890 to 1895, roughly coinciding with the period of his romantic involvement with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, sixteen years his junior. Douglas's strained relationship with his father, John Sholto Douglas, Marquees of Queensberry, eventually resulted in a series of confrontations between Wilde and the Marquees, which first led to a libel suit brought by Wilde against his lover's father (who had openly accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite" and threatened to disown his son if he didn't give up his acquaintance with the writer) and subsequently to two criminal trials against Wilde for "gross indecencies," based on a law generally interpreted to prohibit homosexual relationships. Sentenced to a two-year term of "hard labor" in Reading Gaol, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 a spiritually, physically and financially broken man and, unable to continue living in England or Ireland, after three years' wanderings throughout Europe died in 1900 of cerebral meningitis, barely 46 years old.

"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Wilde's only novel besides seven plays as well as several works of short fiction, poetry, nonfiction and two fairy tale collections originally written for his two sons, is critical to an understanding of Wilde's body of work and his personality primarily for two reasons: First, because it constitutes one of his earliest fully accomplished formulations of Aestheticism, and secondly because of its undeniable undercurrent of homoeroticism; an inclination which, after a six-year marriage widely thought to initially have been a true love match, Wilde had begun to explore more openly around the time of the novel's creation (1890). The story's title character is an exceptionally handsome young man who, both in the eyes of the artist tasked to paint his portrait, Basil Hallward, and in those of their somewhat older friend Lord Henry Wotton, epitomizes perfect beauty and is coveted by both men for that very reason. Seduced by hedonistic Lord Henry into believing that beauty can literally justify anything, including any act of immorality, Dorian sells his soul for maintaining his beautiful appearance, letting his portrait age in his stead. (In that, his character resembles Goethe's and Marlowe's Faust.) He then quickly turns from an innocent youth into a cruel and calculating man whom society, in its shallow adherence to appearances, nonetheless never associates with any of the results of his cruelty, never looking beyond the surface of his handsome exterior and assuming that a man so beautiful must necessarily also be good. Ultimately it is Dorian himself who brings about his own downfall when he is no longer able to face the manifestation of his evilness in Basil Hallward's picture.

Upon its initial publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was widely scorned as immoral by a public neither familiar with nor particularly open to the concepts of Aestheticism and its mockery of middle class morality, and repulsed by the thinly veiled homoerotic relationship of the novel's protagonists. Wilde republished the work the following year, adding a preface designed to explain his views on art. Yet, it was that preface which, along with several of his other publications and his written exchanges with Lord Alfred Douglas, ultimately would play a devastating role in his trials, where Queensberry's attorney would come to use an excerpt from that very preface - "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written" - to extract from Wilde statements to the effect that any book inspiring a sense of beauty (including, as implied in the attorney's question, an "immoral" book, if "The Picture of Dorian Gray" could be qualified as such) was well-written and therefore commendable; that only Philistines, brutes and illiterates - whose views on art he considered invariably stupid and for which he therefore didn't "care twopence" - could consider this novel "perverted," and that the majority of the reading public would probably not be able to draw a proper distinction between a good and a bad book. It was testimony such as this, as well as the impending confrontation with a number of male witnesses ready to testify as to the nature of their relationship with Wilde, that not only caused the author's attorney to convince his client to drop the libel suit against Queensberry but also opened the door for Wilde's own subsequent prosecution.

If "The Picture of Dorian Gray" has a central theme besides the supremacy of beauty and the depiction of a society primarily interested in appearances, it is a call for individuality: Dorian's cruelty is brought out only after he allows himself to be influenced by Lord Henry's equally seductive and cynical hedonism; and similarly, Basil Hallward's blind idolizing of Dorian eventually proves fatal for the painter. - Wilde's only novel is one of the first and most poignant expressions of his own individualism; but unlike his protagonist, who ultimately pays a ghastly prize for selling his soul and giving up his individuality, Wilde paid as high a price for maintaining his. Like Dorian, he knew that "[e]ach of us has Heaven and Hell in him," and although this novel's preface ends with the provocative statement that "[a]ll art is quite useless," it was the very fact that Wilde put his entire being into his art that ultimately destroyed him. But like beauty, which is finally restored to perfection in Dorian Gray's portrait, Wilde's works have stood the test of time; and not merely for their countless, pricelessly witty epigrams. They're as well worth a read as ever.

On the strength of the first edition, I ordered the second edition for a course. The second edition is missing five pages from Chapter III of the 1890 version of the novel.

I have tried contacting Norton. Their feedback page did not work.