First Folio [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION In this collection, fifteen of today's finest writers introduce books which hold enormous significance for them - and although some of the choices might at first seem surprising, all are eminently fitting. The themes are eternal - war, power, love, childhood, nostalgia, heroes and anti-heroes, the influence of travel and experience of differing cultures, the circumlocutions of the human brain and the arguably greater complexities of the human heart. 'Between the more or less, of course, is where fiction usually happens,' writes John Sutherland on one of the most powerful indictments of war ever produced - Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse- Five. Vonnegut drew on his own eyewitness experiences of the decimation of Dresden, commenting later that 'all organic things were consumed' in the 1945 mass bombing of the German city. As Sutherland points out, Slaughterhouse-Five is 'like a fly trapped in a blob of amber it is very much a novel of its time, the 1960s'. But what a novel. Just over seventy years before Vonnegut, H. G. Wells was invent- ing a new genre of writing - science fiction. In perhaps his most famous work, The War of the Worlds, Wells's late nineteenth-century depiction of a tranquil Surrey at the mercy of an alien invasion - with Wells its lower middle-class hero - seems eerily prescient of twenty- first-century Britain. According to Iain Sinclair, The War of the Worlds also 'anticipates the hopelessness of coming ecological disaster, rivers choked with red weed'; a time when society understands that 'terror is a given, part of the human contract', and in so doing, the book 'makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable'. A sixteenth-century political theorist who turned his own disgraced exile to his advantage and formulated a timeless treatise on statecraft, in which an Italian saviour repels foreign usurpers - look no further than Niccoló Machiavelli. And his relevance to our own period of history? As Tim Parks so cogently puts it: 'After the obvious parallels have sprung to mind, and we have marvelled at how applicable the Renaissance writer's precepts still are, the further surprise is our