Дэвид Кинан — новинки

Их называли «разрушителями цивилизации» и обвиняли во всех смертных грехах. Они и правда знали толк в грехе и в искуплении. Эта книга о людях, которые перевернули представления общества о творчестве, мистицизме и экстремальном образе жизни, — о британских экспериментаторах, ставивших опыты на себе и на слушателях. Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Nurse With Wound — история музыки на рубеже веков немыслима без этих групп, их следы видны везде: от андеграунда до поп-культуры.

«Эзотерическое подполье Британии» — это еще и родословная богатой традиции английской эксцентрики и визионерского искусства: на страницах книги встречаются великий мистик Уильям Блейк, одержимые потусторонним художники Луис Уэйн, Чарльз Симс и Остин Осман Спейр, режиссер Дерек Джармен и многие другие искатели запредельного. Ее можно читать и как сагу об отчаянных творцах, колдунах и безумцах, смешавших границы реального и воображаемого. В судьбах ее героев переплелись невероятные амбиции, противление обыденности, магия, преследуемое властями квир-движение, борьба с собой и поиск света посреди кромешной тьмы.

Это издание знаменитой книги шотландского журналиста и прозаика Дэвида Кинана выполнено по расширенному автором в 2016 году тексту.

Belfast, 1970s: Sammy and his three friends live in an impoverished area of the city that has become the epicentre of a country seemingly intent on cannibalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a good drink, and the songs of Perry Como, whose commitment to clean living holds up a dissonant mirror to their own attempts to rise above their circumstances. They dream of a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising. But For the Good Times is not just a novel about the IRA. It is about the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to the cause can bring; of violence and betrayal, breakdown and rebirth.

WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE - 2019

Sammy and his three friends live in the Ardoyne, an impoverished, predominantly Catholic area of North Belfast that has become the epicentre of a country intent on cannibalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a good drink, and the songs of Perry Como - whose commitment to clean living holds up a dissonant mirror to their own attempts to rise above their circumstances. They dream of a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising, even as they fully indulge in the spoils of war.

Keen to make a difference, the boys find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic-book shop taken over by the IRA. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder - and they become transfixed by the initiatory possibilities of free-reign criminality.

But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated, especially after bizarre and gruesome away days in Glasgow and London. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to shrink as he is assaulted by terrifying visions.

For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary depth and power. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', of the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender, of ideas of martyrdom, fatherhood, and self-sacrifice. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles while re-visioning it as a time of psychological and spiritual intensity where the nature of day-to-day reality itself was up for grabs. And through a dizzying amalgam of modernist prose, roughhouse vernacular and hallucinatory Irish humour, it establishes David Keenan as one of our most fearless literary stylists.

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock.

It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends.

Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.