Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    New Grub Street
    New Grub Street
    New Grub Street
    Audiobook21 hours

    New Grub Street

    Written by George Gissing

    Narrated by Peter Joyce

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    One of the greatest novels to have come from the 19th Century, a realistic gritty exposure of the lives, loves, intrigue and rivalry that existed in the literary world of London. The art form and culture of writing is becoming a business, expanding rapidly, and profit is more important than integrity of purpose.

    In the search for a wider readership, editors and publishers look to the poorer educated classes believing that shorter, slighter commercial treatments will sell and thus erudite writers with serious ideas and "urgent messages for the world" have their work devalued.

    "Instead of Chat I should call it Chit-Chat….it would sell like hot cakes. On the same principle…….if the Tatler were changed to Tittle-Tattle it’s circulation would be trebled…An admirable idea! Tittle-Tattle -a magnificent title; the very thing to catch the multitude."

    The downward intellectual spiral is, of course, contrasted by the progress of lightweight, jobbing writers able to turn their pen, with ease, to any task and supply copy with trite, popular appeal.

    Gissing knew his subject well and his characterisation of the facile, unscrupulous Milvain, the rancorous Yule, the paranoid and impoverished Reardon all have the note of authenticity as do the women used and abused by them in their struggle for success and the publication of their work.

    Truly one of the books from which we should learn, monumental in the telling, the story is an engrossing tale, describing a shabby Pyrrhic victory, at the expense of all those with a reasoning mind, of self advertisement over artistic endeavour in an ongoing war- of what happens when pen meets penury.

    This story will capture and uplift the hearts of every listener.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAssembled Stories
    Release dateJan 4, 2009
    ISBN9781860153372
    Author

    George Gissing

    George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist. Born in Yorkshire, he excelled as a student from a young age, earning a scholarship to Owens College where he won prizes for his poetry and academic writing. Expelled and arrested for a series of thefts in 1876, Gissing was forced to leave England for the United States, teaching classics and working as a short story writer in Massachusetts and Chicago. The following year, he returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional novelist, publishing works of naturalism inspired by his experience of poverty and the works of Charles Dickens. After going through an acrimonious divorce, Gissing remarried in 1891 and entered a turbulent relationship with Edith Alice Underwood, with whom he raised two children before separating in 1897. During this time, after writing several unpublished novels, Gissing found success with New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), and The Odd Women (1893). In the last years of his life, Gissing befriended H.G. Wells and travelled throughout Italy, Germany, and France, where he died after falling ill during a winter walk.

    More audiobooks from George Gissing

    Related to New Grub Street

    Related audiobooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Eight Hot Trollopes

      Jun 17, 2019

      An experiment for 21st-century readers: let’s take a quick tour of the love scenes of a famous Victorian novelist to see if his writings still enflame. The post Eight Hot Trollopes appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Writing Back to Guy and Harriet Pringle

      May 11, 2018

      I met Guy and Harriet Pringle in the winter of 1987. In those days, Turkish public television had a rather ingenious arrangement with public radio; they would show the dubbed series, and the radio would play the original soundtrack. I do not remember

      9 min read

    • Article

      Mexican Gothic

      Jun 17, 2020

      RELEASED 30 JUNE 299 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia Publisher Del Rey There are shades of Daphne du Maurier in this twisty little gothic novel, which pits a young woman against the horrors of a crumbling ancestral home. Our heroin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Books About Family Secrets | Jyoti Patel

      Jan 18, 2023

      Where there are families there are stories and where there are stories there are always secrets. It’s ripe crop for a writer. In literature, these are a staple of the coming-of-age novel. Family secrets seem to rise to the surface when a protagonist

      4 min read

    • Article

      History

      Sep 21, 2022

      History
      14 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      History

      Jun 29, 2022

      History
      11 min read

    • Article

      Very Hampstead, very Kingsley Amis

      Oct 29, 2020

      I HEARD THESE WORDS in the Flask Bookshop in Flask Walk, Hampstead — which I owned and ran from 1975 until 1988 — while slumped in the back room on my leather swivel chair, quite as usual, smoking a pipe and reading: I was always reading. It was a un

      10 min read

    • Article

      Fiction

      Apr 3, 2024

      Fiction
      9 min read

    • Article

      For The Love Of Language: ‘Our Riches’ Celebrates Reading

      Jun 2, 2020

      Kaouther Adimi’s newly translated novel weaves together fact and fiction in a story about a famous Algerian bookstore and its fiercely loyal patrons.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Why Charlotte Brontë’s Tiny £1m Pamphlet Proves That Little Things Mean A Lot | Louisa Young

      Aug 7, 2022

      Last week one of Charlotte Brontë’s “little books” finally made it home to where it was written, the Parsonage at Haworth. It’s a tiny pamphlet, 10cm by 6cm, handmade and handwritten by Charlotte when she was 13. It’s hard to imagine anything more fr

      3 min read

    • Article

      History

      Sep 20, 2023

      JOYA CHATTERJI Bodley Head, 849pp, £30 Married to Anil Seal, Chatterji is ‘one half of the power couple that has led the study of South Asian history at Cambridge for fifty years,’ wrote Oxford historian Zareer Masani in the Literary Review, and is t

      10 min read

    • Article

      Cross- Pollination

      Nov 8, 2018

      Cross- Pollination
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 247

      Sep 8, 2020

      The Art of Fiction No. 247
      38 min read

    • Article

      My Golden Book Of Hours

      Jun 1, 2022

      My Golden Book Of Hours
      4 min read

    • Article

      Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

      Oct 11, 2017

      If it weren’t so illustrative of the loaded identitarian schism at the heart of leftist politics, it would make for the perfect right-wing conspiracy: not only have well-meaning liberals become too PC, they are now roundly dismissed as blinkered by t

      14 min read

    • Article

      Pulp Addiction

      Sep 16, 2022

      Pulp Addiction
      15 min read

    • Article

      Jeanette Winterson’s Book Burning Stunt Is A Masterclass In Staying Relevant And Edgy

      Jun 9, 2021

      The world of publishing is aflame. “Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers,” tweeted the prize-winning author Jeanette Winterson, OBE, CBE, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. “Turned me into wimmins fiction of the w

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for New Grub Street

    4.5/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      It was unclear to me till the very end what the author intended as a message. There were so many ups and downs for our characters, but in the end, the new mercantile approach to providing literary content (quantity over quality, my dear fellow!) in late 19th century, London, wins out and paves the way to the future.

      He dwelt excessively,I thought, on privation and misery in the lives of his characters. It did get wearing, but the story with his wealth of detail on London at that time held my attention and I was compelled by the thoughts and feelings of his characters.
    • 5/5
      I've never read a classic with characters as wonderful as these!
    • 5/5
      Characters were well developed and unlike Dickens the ending was not a happy one but I was satisfied and surprised pleasingly