Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial...

"Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious."

Alex is a teenage hooligan, in a near-future England, who gets jailed by the police. There, he volunteers for a new aversion therapy proposed by the government. "Cured" of his hooliganism and released, he is rejected by his friends and relatives. Eventually, nearly dying, he becomes a major government embarrassment and they arrange to cure him of his cure. He and his gang break into an author's home. The author is writing a book that is a plea against...