The Rock Pool
Cyril Connolly

First published in 1936, this engaging satire chronicles the clash between two cultures—the snobbish, cliché-ridden English world that Naylor, the hero, represents, and an international group of artists and writing who inhabit a French Riviera town. Naylor, a smug young literary man from Oxford, at first studies the dissolute inhabitants as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool. But he soon is demoralized and swindled by them, and as winter approaches he remains, scarcely distinguishable from them.
Much has been written of the expatriate temperament, but nowhere has it been treated with greater wit, spirit, and elegance of style, than in this small, enduring classic.

“Sentence by sentence—as Naylor the protagonist subverts himself among personalities more livid than he could dream—it is superb.”
—John Leonard, The New York Times

Cyril Connolly, the famed critic and essayist, founded the British magazine Horizon in 1939. He is the author of Enemies of Promise, The Condemned Playground, Ideas and Places, The Modern Movementm and The Unquiet Grave. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-059-3 / 138 pages / Fiction