The Wanting Seed

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W. W. Norton & Company, 1963 - Fiction - 285 pages
The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world that overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world of spacelessness where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality ("It's Sapiens to be Homo"). This time of the near future is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without enemies. The Wanting Seed is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
17
Section 3
23
Section 4
35
Section 5
47
Section 6
53
Section 7
57
Section 8
85
Section 14
143
Section 15
163
Section 16
173
Section 17
175
Section 18
178
Section 19
184
Section 20
198
Section 21
217

Section 9
96
Section 10
109
Section 11
125
Section 12
130
Section 13
136
Section 22
231
Section 23
269
Section 24
273
Section 25
281
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About the author (1963)

Anthony Burgess was born in 1917 in Manchester, England. He studied language at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He had originally applied for a degree in music, but was unable to pass the entrance exams. Burgess considered himself a composer first, one who later turned to literature. Burgess' first novel, A Vision of Battlements (1964), was based on his experiences serving in the British Army. He is perhaps best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which was later made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. In addition to publishing several works of fiction, Burgess also published literary criticism and a linguistics primer. Some of his other titles include The Pianoplayers, This Man and Music, Enderby, The Kingdom of the Wicked, and Little Wilson and Big God. Burgess was living in Monaco when he died in 1993.

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