“The impact of Doris Lessing is still profound”, says Gaby Wood. And indeed, throughout her impressive and long career, Lessing earned the W.H. Gibson Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the David Cohen Prize, the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award, among others. In 2007 she became the eleventh woman and the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She declined damehood in 1992 but accepted appointment as a Companion of Honor in 1999. She penned both realistic novels as well as fantasy and science fiction. Lessing's literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Canopus in Argos: Archives is a sequence of five science fiction novels. Each book covers unrelated events, with the exception of Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments, which tell the story of accelerated evolution on Earth through the eyes of Canopeans and Sirians respectively. The last book in series, The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, is about telling lies, specifically political propaganda. Like fish in water, humans live in an atmosphere of words, seldom thinking about the nature of this surrounding element. We trust that our whole speech community shares a common understanding of the words we use. Thus, it is not always the truth… Enjoy free online English audiobook “The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire”, a novel by Doris Lessing.
