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Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he's offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday.Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama.Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is to change the way they think, to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I'll be able to say: Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody. It's man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins.John Hodge's blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny.Collaborators by John Hodge premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2011. It is published here with an introduction by the author.
I am scared, that once this war is over, and I am sent home, that you won't be here. That you will have left. Leonard and Violet, young, restless and in love, spend their first night together knowing it may also be their last. It's 1942 and, in a hotel room in Bath, they dream of their future while preparing for Leonard's departure to the war. But the bombs begin to fall and their world will never be the same again.In the year 2002, the couple look back at what might have been.Examining the impact of the Second World War on two ordinary lives and a love that spans more than sixty years, Nick Payne's One Day When We Were Young premiered at the Crucible Studio, Sheffield, in October 2011 in a Paines Plough production.
First published in 1983, River celebrates fluvial landscapes, their creatures and their regenerative powers.Inspired by Hughes's love of fishing and by his environmental activism, the poems are a deftly and passionatelyattentive chronicle of change over the course of the seasons. West Country rivers predominate ('The West Dart'and 'Torridge'), but other poems imagine or recall Japanese rivers or Celtic rivers, and 'The Gulkana' exploresan ancient Alaskan watercourse. At its core the sequence rehearses, in various settings, from winter to winter,the life-cycle of the salmon.All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,The epic poiseThat holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom,so patientIn the machinery of heaven.from 'October Salmon'
A new and essential selection from the range and bulk of Robert Graves's poetry, edited by Ulster poet Michael Longley. This edition will restore Graves to view as a major twentieth century poet, and demonstrate his manifold achievement as war poet, as love poet, and as - in the round - a secular visionary whose poems are 'inimitable, eccentric marvels - some of which are extraordinary, many are masterly, all are like nothing else ever written' (Randall Jarrell).
Legend has it that Hollywood lures gifted writers into its service with sunshine and money, only to treat them as glorified typists and plot-mechanics, peripheral to the main business of moviemaking. This is what Ian Hamilton describes as 'the writer-in-chains saga that emerges from any study of Hollywood during its so-called golden years - the period I have marked as running from 1915-1951.' But in this superb account of what befell the likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chandler and Huxley by working for the Dream Factory, Hamilton argues that these writers 'were in the movies by choice: they earned far more money than their colleagues who did not write for films, and in several cases they applied themselves conscientiously to the not-unimportant task at hand. And they had a lot of laughs...''Fascinating and enjoyable.' New Statesman'Abounds in marvelous stories, apocryphal, fabulous, funny and even true.' ObserverFaber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.
In this, the companion volume to his earlier autobiographical Apostate (1926), Forrest Reid continues his 'chronicle of a prolonged personal adventure'. Private Road (first published in 1940) offers Reid's descriptions of his early writing efforts; a youthful correspondence with Henry James that began with promise yet ended disappointingly ('the Master was not pleased...'); his Cambridge encounters with such luminaries as Ronald Firbank and W.B. Yeats; the production and reception of his first published works; and his valued friendships with E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare. The closing stages of the book reflect Reid's unique sense of the spiritual: a compelling meditation on our 'second life' in a place Reid calls 'dreamland', wherein a 'shadowy agent' conjures an atmosphere that can hold powerful inspirational properties for the artist.Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost/neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see ourblog faberfindsblog.co.uk. Normal 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */
'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks ... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was Jonestown the latest manifestation...?' Jonestown (1996), one of Wilson Harris's most acclaimed creations, is a fictional re-imagining of the real-life ritual mass suicide orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in the remote Guyana forest in 1978. The novel's narrator, Francisco Bone, has survived the suicide albeit in a traumatized condition. By way of a dream-book he tries to heal his psychic wound, under the influence of the Mayan concept of time that twins past and future. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.
Black Marina, set on an 'island paradise' in the Caribbean, tells a story of great force and poignancy partly inspired by the events surrounding the invasion of Grenada in 1983.Holly Baker, an English woman, came to St James during her carefree days of bar-hopping in the 1960s. Somehow she never managed to get away. Now, her loyalties fluctuating, she is caught up in the advanced stages of a drama both personal and political - and which embodies the conflicts inherent in this small, dangerously placed society. As the island and its visitors prepare for Christmas, events that were seeded at the time of Holly's arrival on St James finally blow up into a violent and chilling debacle.'A gentle and poetic style contains a hot, explosive story.' Vogue'Witty and tragic.' ListenerFaber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.
The notorious Robin Hood and his band of outlaws steal from the rich, creating a fearsome reputation amongst those who dare to travel through the mighty forest of Sherwood. But they do not share their spoils with the poor and are unloved by the people, who must also pay unfair taxes to the evil Prince John as he plots to steal his brother's crown. In this time of chaos and fear, it is down to Marion to boldly protect the poor and convince Robin that he must listen to his heart if they are to save the country.The Heart of Robin Hood, David Farr's spirited new version of the great English legend, was premiered by the RSC at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2011.
-You're having some kind of crisis.-It's called being fifty. You must be having it too.Hilary once protested at Greenham. Now her protests tend to focus on persuading her teenage daughter to go out fully clothed. A frank and funny family drama questioning parental anxieties and life after fifty, Jumpy by April De Angelis premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 2011.
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mileHe made a crooked deal and he blew a crooked pileHe dug a crooked hole And he sank the crooked isleAnd they all went to hell in a stew of crooked bile.The Devil I Know is a thrilling novel of greed and hubris, set against the backdrop of a brewing international debt crisis. Told by Tristram, in the form of a mysterious testimony, it recounts his return home after a self-imposed exile only to find himself trapped as a middle man played on both sides - by a grotesque builder he's known since childhood on the one hand, and a shadowy businessman he's never met on the other. Caught between them, as an overblown property development begins in his home town of Howth, it follows Tristram's dawning realisation that all is not well.From a writer unafraid to take risks, The Devil I Know is a bold, brilliant and disturbing piece of storytelling.
With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver explores her trademark themes of family, community and the natural world. Defiant, funny and courageously honest, High Tide in Tucson is an engaging and immensely readable collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.'Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent and concise humour. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart, and the soul.' New York Times Book Review
The short stories in this collection are spread over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia. In every setting the characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the ties of love and family history: a child accepts the impossible responsibility of remembering her Cherokee great-grandmother's dying culture; a quietly dissolving couple must fight ghosts of past expectations to reach one another; a tough Mexican American woman finds herself in jail because of her commitment to a family legacy of 'doing the right thing'. Homeland and Other Stories follows in the tradition of some of the great short story writers of our time, including Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor and Annie Proulx. With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver emerges as a true master of the form.
In this collection of essays, the author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us (out of one of history's darker moments) an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on - sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive - Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.
Elizabeth I came to the throne at a time of insecurity and unrest. Rivals threatened her reign; England was a Protestant island, isolated in a sea of Catholic countries. Spain plotted an invasion, but Elizabeth's Secretary, Francis Walsingham, was prepared to do whatever it took to protect her.He ran a network of agents in England and Europe who provided him with information about invasions or assassination plots. He recruited likely young men and 'turned' others. He encourage Elizabeth to make war against the Catholic Irish rebels, with extreme brutality and oversaw the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.The Queen's Agent is a story of secret agents, cryptic codes and ingenious plots, set in a turbulent period of England's history. It is also the story of a man devoted to his queen, sacrificing his every waking hour to save the threatened English state.
Edna O'Brien's wonderful, wild and moving novel shocked the nation on its publication in 1960. Adapted for the stage by the author, The Country Girls, the play, is a highly theatrical and free-flowing telling of this classic coming of age story.
1957. War widow Dorothy lives in a London suburb with her 15-year-old daughter Victoria and her older bachelor brother Edwin. More and more isolated from her married friends with their successful children, Dorothy tries to cope with Victoria's increasingly hostile behaviour. But is she doing her best, as she thinks, or is she in fact responsible for what threatens to become an unendurable situation?'A exquisitely observed, profoundly quiet slice of 1950s suburban life.' The Sunday Times'Meticulously evocative' Independent'Manville is magnificent in this broodingly muted family drama.' Sunday Express'Leigh makes you laugh and laugh - until you cry.' Time Out'A haunting portrait of loss and loneliness, exquisitely acted throughout and led by a riveting performance by Manville.' Financial Times'Leigh's meticulous production potently captures the pain that lurked behind stiff upper lips in the England of the Fifties.' Daily Telegraph'Nobody gets more truthful performances from actors than Mike Leigh.' The Times'The acting is superb.' Guardian'Leigh directs with sensitivity.' Evening Standard'Extraordinarily poignant' Independent on Sunday
The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.Edna O'Brien's haunting spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts her (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind in a narrative voice of blistering, radical originality.This ebook features the first chapter of Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel, Girl, published by Faber in September 2019 and available to pre-order now.
Duck Macatarsney cares for her biker dad, Duke, whose MS is getting worse. Duke is a spliff-smoking (for medicinal reasons you understand), bike-riding, heavy-metal- and horror-movie-loving, pizza-eating widower who has brought up Duck since the death of her mum in a crash. The two of them are just about surviving when one morning the Duke wakes up blind and the Duck hears Social Services are coming to take her away.The Monster in the Hall follows Duck as she tries to protect her world from the terrifying prospect of change.David Greig's The Monster in the Hall premiered at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, in autumn 2010, and was staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 2011 as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Franz Schubert's Winterreise is at the same time one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western culture. In his new book, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge - one of the work's finest interpreters - focusses on the context, resonance and personal significance of a work which is possibly the greatest landmark in the history of Lieder. Drawing equally on his vast experience of performing this work (he has performed it more than a hundred times), on his musical knowledge and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge unpicks the enigmas and subtle meaning of each of the twenty-four songs to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, bringing the work and its world alive for connoisseurs and new listeners alike. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Though not strictly a biography of Schubert, Schubert's Winter Journey succeeds in offering an unparalleled insight into the mind and work of the great composer. 'Usually great singers cannot explain what they do. Ian Bostridge can. Whether or not you know Schubert's 'Winter Journey', the book is gripping because it explains, in probing, simple words, how a doomed love is transformed into art.' Richard Sennett
In Psychedelia and Other Colours, acclaimed author Rob Chapman explores in crystalline detail the history, precedents and cultural impact of LSD, from the earliest experiments in painting with light and immersive environments to the thriving avant-garde scene that existed in San Francisco even before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium. In the UK, he documents an entirely different history, and one that has never been told before. It has its roots in fairy tales and fairgrounds, the music hall and the dead of Flanders fields, in the Festival of Britain and that peculiarly British strand of surrealism that culminated in the Magical Mystery Tour. Sitars and Sergeant Pepper, surfadelica and the Soft Machine, light shows and love-ins - the mind-expanding effects of acid were to redefine popular culture as we know it. Psychedelia and Other Colours documents these utopian reverberations - and the dark side of their moon - in a perfect portrait.
Friday, February 12 1993. Two outwardly unremarkable ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, began their day playing truant and ended it running an errand for a local video shop. In between they abducted and killed the toddler James Bulger. The Sleep of Reason is the harrowing, sensitive, definitive account of this terrible crime and its consequences.In a new Preface (which considers the re-arrest of Jon Venables in February 2010) David James Smith writes: 'It is as true now as it was then that the murder has never really been explained and the motive for the crime remains a mystery. This book, the result of considerable research and a painstaking, sometimes distressing assembly of the facts, was my attempt to offer some insight and understanding.''Surprisingly evocative, even moving... immensely valuable.' Times'Dramatic and disturbing.' Anita Brookner, Observer'Compelling and compassionate.' Times Educational Supplement
The Silver Darlings is a tale of lives hard won from a cruel sea and crueller landlords. It tells of strong young men and stronger women whose loves, fears and sorrows are set deep in a landscape of raw beauty and bleak reward. The dawning of the Herring Fisheries brought with it the hope of escape from the brutality of the Highland Clearances, and Neil Gunn's story paints a vivid picture of a community fighting against nature and history and refusing to be crushed.
'Going to law courts is a good education for a novelist. It provides you with the most extravagant material, and it teaches the near impossibility of reaching the truth.'Sybille Bedford, Paris Review (1993)For The Faces of Justice (1961) Sybille Bedford journeyed through Europe to sit in the press box of the courts of law - high courts, low courts, police courts. In England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, she watched the prisoners at the bar, the accusing community arrayed against them, the advocates, the jurors, the judges on the bench. She saw justice being attempted under the law - the best we can do, the worst we can do - varying in subtle yet astonishing ways from country to country. The result is a story about justice, humanity and the individual - moving, dramatic, superbly observed, splendidly told.
In the last eight years of his life - and he died when he was only thirty-three - Denton Welch wrote three novels, umpteen short stories, hundreds of poems, and - between 1942 and 1948, a profoundly personal and moving journal that recorded his swift maturity into a writer of genius. Therein he wrote of his battle with ill-health, his life lived in claustrophobic rooms, and (in frank, erotic terms) his frustrated pursuit of the 'ideal friend.' And yet he encountered some of the foremost writers of his time - Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West - and recorded every aspect of life with a fresh and arresting sensitivity.
Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James
Alan Hackney's first novel, Private's Progress tells the story of the hapless Stanley Windrush. Called up in 1942 after his first year at Oxford, and despite his best efforts to avoid any kind of work or action, Stanley wanders from one mishap to the next, causing mayhem and meeting a host of unscrupulous characters along the way. First published in 1954, Private's Progress was later made into a Boulting Brothers' film of the same name, and is the prequel to I'm All Right Jack, also published by Faber Finds.
Peter Waring (1937) is a full-scale revision of Reid's earlier Following Darkness (1912) in which Peter, a sensitive boy with literary inclinations, grows up unhappily in the household of his father, a cold village schoolmaster in Newcastle, County Down, and among his Belfast relatives whom he finds intolerable.'An acute and subtle story of adolescence.... A delicacy and a grave beauty which make their own quiet appeal.' Times'Reid has written one of the finest studies of the mental, sexual, spiritual life of the adolescent without ever mentioning the words.' Glasgow Herald
Everyone's favourite hamster has another adventure in Room 26 and beyond!In this eleventh book in the bestselling 'According to Humphrey' series, Humphrey and his friends in Room 26 let their imaginations loose! Ahead of a big author visit to Longfellow Elementary School, they try writing their own stories, but Humphrey worries that hamsters don't have any imagination; he's finding creative writing just too hard. While he helps out his friends in Room 26, and the new school pet Gigi, a guinea pig, Humphrey encounters real, live parrots, dragons and even ghosts . . . and finally manages to let his imagination soar.
The next in the bestselling According to Humphrey series, Humphrey and his friends in Room 26 learn about ancient Egypt. Mummies, pharaohs, pyramids and plenty of SHH-SHH-SHH secrets abound! Will Humphrey be able to solve the mysteries of the pharaohs...?From award-winning author Betty G. Birney.
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