A World of My Own: A Dream Diary

The British author shares the "strange . . . inner layers of his playful, guilty imagination" in this glimpse into a brilliant novelist's subconscious (The New York Times). Culled from nearly eight hundred pages of the author's "dream diaries" kept between 1965 and 1989, this singular journal reveals "the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of [his] novelistic obsessions, insecurities, and moral preoccupations" (Publishers Weekly). In what Greene calls My Own World--as opposed to the Common World of shared reality--he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who's doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He also shares his headspace with Goebbels, Castro, Cocteau, Queen Elizabeth, D. H. Lawrence, and talking kittens. And the landscape is just as wide: from Nazi Germany to Haiti to West Africa to Bethlehem 1 AD and to Sweden where he seeks treatment for leprosy. Greene is a criminal, spy, lover, assassin, witness, and writer. Encompassing life, death, war, feuds, and career, and alternately absurdist, frightening, funny, and revealing, these fertile imaginings--many of which found their way into Greene's fiction--comprise nothing less than "an alternate autobiography . . . a uniquely candid self-portrait" of one of the giants of English literature (Kirkus Reviews).

About the Author :
Graham Greene (1904-1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.

Review :
Praise for Graham Greene "The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling." --V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London) "In a class by himself . . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." --William Golding "A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy." --The New York Times "Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations. . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within." --Norman Sherry, Independent "No serious writer of [the twentieth] century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene." --Time "One of the finest writers of any language." --The Washington Post "A superb storyteller--he had a talent for depicting local colour, a keen sense of the dramatic, an eye for dialogue, and skill in pacing his prose." --The New York Times "Graham Greene was a profound and experimental stylist." --Time Out "Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature." --John le Carré "Greene was a force beyond his books." --Melvyn Bragg "Greene's fictional products are to conventional mystery stories what an Alfred Hitchcock exercise in cinematic suspense is to the ordinary Grade B Whodunit." --Weekly Book Review "Mr. Greene's extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration . . . moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion." --The Times (London) "Graham Greene taught us to understand the social and economic cripples in our midst. He taught us to look at each other with new eyes. I don't suppose his influence will ever disappear." --Auberon Waugh, The Independent "A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time." --Newsweek