Weekender: The Elusive Jan Marsalek
by Bradley Hope
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This week’s Brazen Weekender dives into the origin story of A Clockwork Orange—written in a rush after a fatal diagnosis that turned out to be false—and what it tells us about urgency, ambition, and legacy. Plus, what to watch, read, and listen to right now.
Hello and welcome to this weekend’s edition of Brazen Weekender, where our team selects great things to watch, listen to and read. This week Farah kicks it off with inspiration from the origin story of the book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
ICYMI: Check out our latest Rich List on Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, one of the world's richest and most powerful autocrats. The full rich list is here.
By Farah Halime
How would you handle the news that you had only a year to live?
Would you abandon responsibility and drown in indulgence? Or seek out meaning in religious scripture, racing against time to "find yourself?" Or, perhaps most radically, would you lean so fully into who you are, your ambition, your desire, that you create something lasting, maybe even legendary?
This is the story of the author Anthony Burgess, who was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour and in that suspended state, liberated from the future and unshackled from fear, wrote the seminal book, A Clockwork Orange. Not over twelve months, but in a staggering three weeks.
It remains Burgess's most famous work. And its impact on our culture, both literary, musical, and visual (with Stanley Kubrick's vision) is extensive.
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