The Habit of Loving Year First Published: 1957 First Published by: Thomas Y. Crowell Company Category: Short Stories This Edition: American first edition click on image for larger version

From the book jacket: Doris Lessing, the only woman in Britain's coterie of "angry men," caused a sensation in London's literary circles with the publication of the seventeen stories here gathered together. In the sense in which James Gould Cozzens used the word, the stories are, for the most part, concerned with men and women by love "possessed." They display a wide emotional ranged, from the title story about the aging rake, George Talbot, a man of the theater who marries a young, doll-like woman, to the last story in the book, "The Eye of God in Paradise", a shattering and frightening contemporary picture of the undaunted German ego. The stories vary widely also in setting: some in Africa, from Johannesburg to the vast farms; some in London, Paris and the south of France. Mrs. Lessing brings unrivaled artistry and technique to that most difficult of literary mediums, the short story... Also see: British Edition Included in this Edition: The Habit of Loving The Words He Said The Woman Through the Tunnel Lucy Grange Pleasure A Mild Attack of Locusts The Witness Flavours of Exile Getting Off the Altitude A Road to the Big City Flight The Day Stalin Died Plants and Girls Wine He The Eye of God in Paradise O T H E R . E D I T I O N S Ballantine American paperback reprint Published May 1965 Thomas Y. Crowell Company American hardcover reprint Undated, possibly 1975 ISBN: 0-690-00501-6 Note: This version is often sold as a first edition, and at a high price. It is not a first edition, it is a reprint. The fact that there is an ISBN number in it indicates it was printed after 1970.