Эли Уильямз0.0 This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one’s thoughts — absurd, encompassing, oblique — may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.
Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.
With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold debut collection from one of Britain’s most original new writers.
Гвендолин Райли3.5 From “one of Britain’s most original young writers” (The Observer), a blistering account of a marriage in crisis and a portrait of a woman caught between withdrawal and self-assertion, depression and rage.
Neve, the novel’s acutely intelligent narrator, is beset by financial anxiety and isolation, but can’t quite manage to extricate herself from her volatile partner, Edwyn. Told with emotional remove and bracing clarity, First Love is an account of the relationship between two catastrophically ill-suited people walking a precarious line between relative calm and explosive confrontation.
Омар эль Аккад0.0 Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war – part of the Miraculous Generation – now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past, his family’s role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.
Hari Kunzru4.0 New Yorkers Carter and Seth chop up old music to make it new again, ripping off black culture to line white pockets. They are young, hungry and talented. But one day they stumble on an old blues song - an undiscovered gem just waiting to be found - and land themselves in a heap of trouble.
Seeking answers, Seth travels deep into the heart of the old South, accompanied by Carter's bewitching sister Leonie. But this is America, where ghosts lie uneasy in shallow graves and tugging one loose thread can unravel a bloody history of injustice. And the closer Seth gets to the haunting truth, the more he feels pursued . . .
White Tears is a nail-biting ride through the terrifying spectre of America's past. It's about black lives and white privilege and the music that runs through the country's veins like blood.
Крэйг Браун, Элинор Брон4.2 She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.
Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. Dudley Moore propositioned her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was in love with her.
For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. “If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies” he confided to a friend, “they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!”
Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding.
In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.
The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.
Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma’am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.
Richard Beard0.0 A family story of exceptional power and universal relevance - about loss, about carrying on, and about recovering a brother's life and death.
Life changes in an instant.
On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Nicholas and his brother Richard are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. He isn’t, and then he is. He drowns.
Richard and his other brothers don’t attend the funeral, and incredibly the family return immediately to the same cottage – to complete the holiday, to carry on. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory.
Nearly forty years later, Richard Beard is haunted by the missing grief of his childhood but doesn’t know the date of the accident or the name of the beach. So he sets out on a pain-staking investigation to rebuild Nicky’s life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident. Who was Nicky? Why did the family react as they did? And what actually happened?
The Day That Went Missing is a heart-rending story as intensely personal as any tragedy and as universal as loss. It is about how we make sense of what is gone. Most of all, it is an unforgettable act of recovery for a brother.
Джонатан Эйг4.0 He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest (as he told us himself). Muhammad Ali was one of the twentieth century’s most fantastic figures and arguably the most famous man on the planet.
But until now, he has never been the subject of a complete, unauthorized biography. Jonathan Eig, hailed by Ken Burns as one of America’s master storytellers, radically reshapes our understanding of the complicated man who was Ali. Eig had access to all the key people in Ali’s life, including his three surviving wives and his managers. He conducted more than 500 interviews and uncovered thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files, as well dozens of hours of newly discovered audiotaped interviews from the 1960s. Collectively, they tell Ali’s story like never before—the story of a man who was flawed and uncertain and brave beyond belief.
“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me—black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”
He was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost. Like so many boxers, he stayed too long.
Jonathan Eig’s Ali reveals Ali in the complexity he deserves, shedding important new light on his politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition. Ali is a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world.
Майя Ясанофф0.0 A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalization and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today
Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Joseph Conrad’s destiny at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world, and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. His life story delivers a history of globalization from the inside out, and reflects powerfully on the aspirations and challenges of the modern world.
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, to Polish parents in the Russian Empire. At sixteen he left the landlocked heart of Europe to become a sailor, and for the next twenty years travelled the world’s oceans before settling permanently in England as an author. He saw the surging, competitive "new imperialism" that planted a flag in almost every populated part of the globe. He got a close look, too, at the places “beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines,” and the hypocrisy of the west’s most cherished ideals.
In a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works—"The Secret Agent", "Lord Jim", "Heart of Darkness", and "Nostromo". Genre-bending, intellectually thrilling, and deeply humane, "The Dawn Watch" embarks on a spell-binding expedition into the dark heart of Conrad’s world—and through it to our own.
Таника Гупта0.0 Based on the true story of her great uncle and freedom fighter Dinesh Gupta, Lions and Tigers is the new play by leading playwright Tanika Gupta. This dramatically relevant and authentic story is set against the backdrop of negotiations between the leaders of the Indian National Congress; the future Prime Minister Nehru wavers between his respect for Gandhi’s non-violence and his admiration for the youthful fervour of the militant Bengali nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose.
Lions and Tigers charts Dinesh Gupta’s emotional and political awakening as this extraordinary 19 year old pits himself against the British Raj. Culminating in actions that shook the foundations of the British Empire, Lions and Tigers challenges our assumptions about Indian independence and offers new insights into the battles between the British lions and the Bengal tigers.
The letters by Nehru, Gandhi and Bose mentioned throughout the play are also taken verbatim from their original correspondence.
Линда Маклин0.0 Tuesday, 19 August, 1561, 9 a.m. Through the fog a ship arrives in Leith docks, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, steps ashore. She is eighteen and on her young shoulders rest the hopes of the Catholic establishment of Europe.
The nation that receives her has just outlawed her church and its practices. Its leader is the radical cleric and protestant reformer, John Knox. Both believe themselves ordained by God. Both believe themselves beloved by their people. Both were exiled and returned home...but only one can make Scotland their own.
Linda McLean's Glory on Earth premiered at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in May 2017.
Гари Макнейр0.0 Locker Room Talk is a provocative piece of event theatre. Inspired by Trump’s leaked sexually aggressive comments, the show is a confronting exploration of the phenomenon the then-presidential candidate later dismissed as ‘locker room talk’.
Does Trump speak to a silent majority or is he simply a loathsome individual? To find out, Gary McNair had frank and honest conversations with men in private about women. The words of these men are performed by a cast of women in this verbatim piece.
