The Speakers

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(as of Apr 12, 2025 03:33:00 UTC – Details)

Heathcote Williams’s literary debut was instantly hailed as a masterpiece, with Harold Pinter describing it as ‘brilliant…a remarkable achievement and very, very funny’.

For the ‘Sunday Times’ it is, ‘A hair-raising book which goes straight into the literature of vagrancy alongside Celine and Genet’; William S Burroughs described it as ‘A fine job of listening, seeing and writing’ while VS Pritchett called it, ‘A very original Beckettish documentary’. Anthony Burgess wrote, ‘This is a book which calls for no concessions, no patronising indulgence. It can stand quite confidently in the hard Sophoclean light’.

Written when the author was just 22, it documents the activities and lives of four fiercely eccentric, yet compellingly eloquent, regular speakers at London’s Hyde Park Corner in the 1960s.

These include MacGuiness (‘I am NOT a paranoiac. Everone IS looking at me) and Van Dyn (‘In case you don’t know who I am, I am the man who was over there a second ago’)

Peripheral characters in the surreal world of ‘The Speakers’ include the ‘Singing Woman’ and the ‘man with the Silent Message’.

This exceptional book, with its Blakeian vision and wry celebration of raw humanity, is a literary classic of the twentieth century.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B073X17R6F
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thin Man Press (July 12, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 12, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 645 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 172 pages