The Black Book

Blurb

The Black Book is a novel by Lawrence Durrell, published in 1938 by the Obelisk Press. It is set with two competing narrators: Lawrence Lucifer on Corfu, in Greece, and Death Gregory in London. Faber and Faber offered to publish the novel in an expurgated edition, but on the advice of Henry Miller, Durrell declined. It was published in the Villa Seurat Series along with Henry Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes and Anaïs Nin's Winter of Artifice.
Although published in 1938, Durrell wrote the novel primarily over a 16-month period from September 1935 until December 1936. The novel shows several surrealist influences, and these may be in part related to materials from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, about which Henry Miller was sending Durrell materials from Herbert Read.
The initial publication was in Paris as its sexual content prohibited publication at that time in England. It was published in the US in 1960 but not published in Great Britain until 1973, following the successful courtroom defense of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
In reviewing it in The Observer, Philip Toynbee wrote,