In Narrative Strategies Roston focuses upon the Greene's texts themselves and their manipulation of reader response, highlighting the innovative strategies that Greene developed to cope with the mid-century invalidation of the traditional hero. The result is a stimulating new reading of the major novels.

In contrast to the classical detective story, the spy novel tends to be considered a suspect, somewhat subversive genre. While previous studies have focused on its historical, thematic, and ideological dimensions, this critical work examines British espionage fiction's unique narrative form, which is typically elliptical, oblique, and recursive. Featured works include eighteen novels by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Len Deighton, John le Carre, Stella Rimington, and Charles Cumming, most of which exemplify the existential or serious spy thriller. Half of these texts pertain to the Cold War era and the other half to its aftermath in the so-called "Age of Terrorism."

A study of Graham Greene's fiction from the perspective of ethics and community, focusing on the narrative pattern that emerges from the author's idiosyncratic use of keywords like peace, despair, compassion or commitment. This book explores their potential for the textual articulation of narrative conflict and the dramatization of the ethical.

A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian). It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing. Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).

British author Graham Greene pursued a professional career as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. After that, he continued taking on reporting assignments as a correspondent for a variety of publications. Greene knew the profession inside out, and the role of the media in shaping the public’s views through information gathering and dissemination—a topic insufficiently researched by criticism—was among his main concerns. Greene’s fictional work features an array of journalists, and the representation of (un)ethical practices of the profession is a constant reference in his narrative. In this book, I intend to fill this research gap in Greenean studies, focusing on three main topics: the author’s reflection on the journalistic practice in connection with the classic paradigm of objectivity versus empathy; his questioning of the misuse of power when gathering and disseminating information by journalists, editors and news corporation owners; and finally, the relationship between journalists and their readership’s expectations, as well as the importance of fostering critical readers that make informed trustworthy decisions regarding journalism performance.

There have been a number of Graham Greene biographies, but none has captured his voice, his loves, hates, family and friends–intimate and writerly–or his deep understanding of the world, like this astonishing collection of letters. Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words. Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters–many of them seen here for the first time–gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement. In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.

Informative, broad-ranging, this title sheds new light on the life and literary art of one of the last century's most celebrated authors. The first volume to be authorized by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, "Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene" brings together writers, journalists and scholars to investigate as well as to assess Greene's prolific oeuvre and intense personal interests. Here the reader may explore everything from Greene's Vienna at the time of the filming of "The Third Man" to his sometimes fraught relationship with Evelyn Waugh, from Greene's unconventional fictional treatment of women to his "believing skepticism". While Greene often informed friends that "a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system", critics of his literary art have found it extraordinarily difficult to define the content of this "ruling passion". Perhaps this is because Greene's own character seems so paradoxical, ironic even. Moreover, in believing that sin contains within itself the seeds of saintliness, he consistently loiters on what Robert Browning calls "the dangerous edge of things". In exploring this "dangerous edge", this book covers the full breadth of Greene's life and literary career.

Mood Spectrum in Graham Greene examines the pathology of bipolar disorder through symptoms uniquely expressed in the writer’s novels. It explains and illustrates how mutated genes endow him with artistic genius, even as they engender a mental illness that too often results in a life barren of intimacy, and in an unquiet mind that can lead to psychosis and suicide if untreated. Critics have generally either ignored his illness in his novels or ascribed agency based on false psychological models, despite Greene often projecting his illness into character-constructs that share his condition and that provide the reader with a virtual case study of manic depression.

What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.