John Carey is Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, a distinguished critic, reviewer and broadcaster, and the author of several books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, and most recently, Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books, described, by James Wood in the London Review of Books, as 'likeable, wise and often right . . . one feels an attractive sense of partisanship in Carey's writing, an alliance with the ordinary, the plain spoken, the unlettered, the sympathetic and the humane. Carey writes with an Orwellian attention to decency'. He is a regular critic on BBC2's Newsnight Review. He is also the editor of the best-selling anthologies The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias.

In Pure Pleasure, John Carey, one of Britain's most respected literary critics, introduces us to what he believes are the fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century based on sheer reading pleasure. Mixing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Carey includes literary heavyweights like James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and T. S. Eliot, as well as more populist writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Kingsley Amis, and John Updike. Carey also discusses masterpieces like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, alongside lesser-known works like D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy and George Orwell's Coming Up for Air.In a series of intelligent and fast-moving essays -- each devoted to a single book -- Carey mixes criticism, biography, and cultural context about each selection with illuminations on the author's inspiration and how each work was written. The end result is a book that no one who is passionate about reading should be without.