Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, Burgess’s novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art. This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of even Anthony Burgess’s fiction in an attempt to understand Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script. As gracefully witty as it is daringly experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess’s late, great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly original to this day. This new critical edition with analysis from noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley enables this work’s significance to be assessed by a new generation of readers and scholars.（.）
Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of Anthony Burgess's fictions.. With its sizzying swirl of formal and thematic invention, this slim book may strike one as something even more impossible that any of Burgess' earlier tours de force.（.）
