WWI literary links

Artists Rifles, Salisbury Plain (1914)

Source.

Serpent's Tail has a new edition of Frederic Manning's Her Privates We. Here's Manning's earlier version of that book, The Middle Parts of Fortune.

A few years ago, Serpent's Tail also re-issued Fear by Garbriel Chevallier (trans. Malcolm Imrie). Imrie's award-winning translation of the novel is about to be re-issued by New York Review Books (with the same Introduction by John Berger). Here's Tobias Grey's review in the WSJ.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 is reviewed at Tony's Book World, and at the Mookse, and by Max Byrd at the NY Times, and by Martha Hanna, and by M. A. Orthofer at Complete Review.

Last year, Alma Books published a bio of Flora Sandes, 'the only Western woman to enlist as a soldier in the First World War'.

Also from last year, Lydia Kiesling on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

A TLS survey from last fall of some recent anthologies of WWI poetry.

Here's a good site with brief entries for several English-language WW1 poets, and another good list (from the same site) of WWI works of  fiction, memoir, and drama.

Vayu Naidu summarizes the proceedings of the Royal Society of Literature's program Voices of the Great War. A 90-minute podcast of the program is available. On it you may hear Michael Longley reading from several of the great WWI poets' works.

Derwent May reviews two books, one on Wilfrid Owen and one one Sigfried Sassoon.

The new book on Owen is by Guy Cuthbertson and was also reviewed by Jason Cowley, by Ferdinand Mount, and by none other than Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The one on Sassoon is by Jean Moorcroft Wilson and combines material from her earlier, two-volume Sassoon biography. This shorter version has also been reviewed by Piers Plowright. Wilson was interviewed about Sassoon a few years ago at the BBC.

Here's a substantial article from 1998 (just before vol. 1 of Jean M. Wilson's bio appeared) by Mark Bostridge about Sassoon's post-war travails.

George Simmers on some of the controversy arising from realistic accounts of WWI brutality in Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed. It was controversial, but in 2002 it was re-issued by Annick Press, a publisher of books for children and young adults.

Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly is now available on-line.