Bold, gritty and blackly comic, Michael Stewart’s new collection of short fiction, Four Letter Words, explores twin contemporary urban dystopias: work and home.
Stylish and unsettling with a seam of black comedy running throughout the collection, Four Letter Words is a baker’s dozen of modern urban noir that offers responses to a number of contemporary concerns such as homelessness, addiction and sexual exploitation.
We all want something to believe in. It s 1987 and Frankie Vah gorges on love, radical politics, and skuzzy indie stardom. But can he keep it all down?
Following the multi-award-winning What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, Luke Wright s second verse play deals with love, loss, and belief, against a backdrop of skuzzy indie venues and 80s politics. Expect frenetic guitars, visceral verse, and a Morrissey-sized measure of heartache.
George Young wasn’t so much on the charts for the best part of three decades: he and his musical partner Harry Vanda were the charts.
George’s journey began with the trailblazing Easybeats and continued, alongside Harry, as producer/songwriter for hire with John Paul Young, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, Cheetah, Ted Mulry, Stevie Wright and, most crucially, AC/DC. George and Harry also struck gold with Flash and the Pan, almost by accident.
George Young helped create such classics as ‘Friday on My Mind’, ‘Sorry’, ‘Love is in the Air’, ‘Evie’, ‘Yesterday’s Hero’, ‘Down Among the Dead Men’, ‘Hey, St. Peter’, ‘Bad Boy for Love’, ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’. In 2001, APRA voted ‘Friday on My Mind’ the best and most significant Australian song of the past 75 years.
In this long-overdue book, the first to focus exclusively on the life and work of George Young, writer Jeff Apter explores George’s long and fruitful association with Harry; his rare ability to maintain a stable married life with his wife Sandra; and his handshake deal with Ted Albert that helped create a music empire. The book also reveals such little-known events as the accident that almost killed off ‘Hey, St. Peter’ before its release, and the tragedy that bonded George and Harry for life.
The food of Iran is a riot of tastes and aroma, and is one of the great – but least known – cuisines of the world. With an emphasis on the use of seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs and fragrant spices, Jila Dana-Haeri here presents a unique guide to quintessential Persian cooking. The varieties of beautiful jewelled rice dishes, hearty winter dishes and crisp summer salads, showcase the diversity of Iranian regional cooking, from the sweet and sour flavours of the Northern Caspian Coast to the spicy and aromatic tastes of the South and the Persian Gulf. The complimentary mix of flavours – the fresh tartness of pomegranate seeds and the subtle perfume of saffron, tarragon, dill and fenugreek – create an array of mouth-watering recipes that are now, thanks to Dana-Haeri’s contribution, accessible to cooks of all levels. This lavishly-illustrated cookbook offers an enticing selection of recipes for any occasion. It will be essential for all interested in expanding their cultural and culinary horizons.
This collection marks a fascinating point in the poetic career of the late Peter Redgrove, when – at the age of seventy – he decided to strike out in a thrilling new direction.
Using a liberating stepped verse form, he opens up new paths in fresh territory, while consolidating his position as one of the finest poets of the natural world. The questing eye of his imagination is in constant motion: the book is full of doors and stairs and wheels, the movement of light and water, the world’s daily transformations. Even his characters are shape-changers – the doctors, dentists, chemists and undertakers are all, in their way, magicians. And, evident throughout the collection, is an undertow of mortality – notably in the extraordinarily moving poems about Redgrove’s late father: ‘his knowledge went, and mine followed,/ Catch it before/ It leaves like a ghost,/ on these stepped verses’.
‘In FURY, Morley’s concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided.’ – Sinead Morrissey, PBS Autumn Bulletin
FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry’s power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morley’s most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world – its power to be an outreached hand, like the ‘trembling hands’ of the magician in ‘The Thrown Voice’ or the ‘living hand’ of the poets celebrated in ‘Translations of a Stammerer’.
Gabriel Bell is a grumpy 44-year-old web journalist irritated by the accumulating disappointments of life. He and his girlfriend Ellie want to start a family but Gabriel has so few sperm he can name them and knit them flippers. So it’s IVF, which is expensive. If losing his job was bad enough getting run over and waking up to find himself in a therapy group run by Angels just beneath heaven really annoys him. And it doesn’t do much for Ellie either. Gabriel is joined therapy by Kevin a professional killer, Yvonne, Kevin’s last victim, a rarely sober but successful businesswoman and Julie, an art teacher who was driving the car that put Gabriel in a coma. In a rural therapeutic community set in an eternal September the group struggles with the therapy. If they do well they may be allowed to go back to earth to finish their lives, or pass into heaven. If they don’t it’s Hell or worse: lots more therapy.
GABRIEL’S ANGEL was the Guardian readers’ book of the year 2011.
W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. This final collection, written in his late-80s, finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Switching between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world. In a poem about Li Po, ‘now there is only the river / that was always on its own way’. In another poem he dreams that ‘the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing’. He remembers when ‘dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days’ and recalls ‘a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century’. In a poem of wonder entitled ‘Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud’, he writes: ‘I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.’
‘Geis’ is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behaviour. In her long-awaited third collection, Caitríona O’Reilly examines the ‘geis’ in all of its psychological, emotional, and moral suggestiveness: exploring the prohibitions and compulsions under which we sometimes place ourselves, or find ourselves placed. In poems that range from the searingly personal to the more playfully abstract and philosophical, O’Reilly’s characteristic imaginative range and linguistic verve are everywhere in evidence. These are poems that question our sometimes tenuous links with the world, with others, and even with ourselves, but which ultimately celebrate the richness of experience and the power of language to affirm it.
Geis is Caitríona O’Reilly’s third collection. It won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize. It follows her critically acclaimed earlier books, The Nowhere Birds (2001), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation which was also shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
Mark Granier is a meditative observer, offering us moments of suffused, painterly stillness. In his work there is no undue clamour to be heard, no flashy flailing about in order to be noticed. This might seem to be diffidence, but I perceive it as integritas. He is resolutely detached, has wit, is visually acute, verbally precise, finely tuned and formally in control. Yet you can feel his keen mind at work. – Liam Ó Muirthile
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is Tishani Doshi’s third book of poems, following two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Begins Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Tishani Doshi has been shortisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and for her accompanying dance performance of the title poem.
Glass Work Humans is a bold, unflinching collection of short stories and poems offering an honest and, at times, darkly humorous glimpse into the fragile and precarious lives of ordinary men and women in 21st-century Scotland. From the steelworker penning a suicide note in his lunch hour to the lonely divorcee finding comfort in a swarm of bees, the war-weary ex-copper toasting lost lives and the battle-scarred son dealing with his violent past, these are all people on the brink but not quite ready to break – seeking hope, salvation and solace in the smallest of everyday miracles.
Tom Gillespie is a Scottish-born novel and short story writer, now living in exile in Bath, England. His stories have been published worldwide in journals, e-zines and creative anthologies. His latest novel, The Strange Book of Jacob Boyce (Vine Leaves Press), has been praised by critics as ‘brilliantly unsettling’ and ‘obsessively compelling’. Tom is a graduate of Glasgow University and works as an English lecturer.
Paul Cowan grew up in Falkirk in central Scotland. After leaving school, he trained as a welder, which took him up and down the country and abroad. He even dipped his toes in the North Sea and worked offshore. He has been honing his skill as a writer, using his own life experiences as his guide, for nearly twenty years. His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Paul can still be found in Falkirk and has a five-year-old daughter.
John McKenzie grew up in Menstrie, a small village in Scotland. He worked in the financial sector until returning to education in his mid-thirties. Six years and one undergraduate degree course later, John is about to complete his Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. He is also working on his first novel.
*** SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 ***
‘A gloriously rambunctious satire of tyranny, oppression and rebellion, with global relevance’ Guardian
From the Booker-shortlisted author of We Need New Names, Glory is an energy burst, an exhilarating joyride. It is the story of an uprising, told by a bold, vivid chorus of animal voices that help us see our human world more clearly
A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily . . .
And then the colonisers arrived, followed by a bloody War of Liberation. New hope came in the form of a charismatic horse who ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For forty years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones. Until one day, as he sat down to his Earl Grey tea and favourite radio programme, in came a new leader, a new regime. And once again the animals were full of hope.
Glory tells the story of a country seemingly trapped in a cycle as old as time. At the centre of the tumult is Destiny, a young goat who has returned to her homeland to bear witness to revolution. Her arrival sets off a chain of events that reminds the denizens, and us, that the glory of tyranny only lasts as long as its victims are willing to let it. And that history can be stopped in a moment.
‘A novel with heart and energy’ Daily Telegraph
‘A brilliant post-colonial fable’ New York Times
‘A fairy tale, a work of satire — and a warning’ New Statesman
‘Acerbic, precise, heart-rending and hilarious’ Scotsman
GLUE the book expands on the true-life script of Louise’s first two meetings with her birth mother, three decades after being put up for adoption. This ‘extended-remix’ features poems and prose, retelling a childhood shuttled from one carer to another. Clear-eyed, affecting, witty and engaging, Glue the book is often disturbing but is ultimately life-affirming.
Pete Haynes was the drummer and founder of the cult punk band The Lurkers. Here, he charts their rise from playing in West London pubs and clubs to appearing on Top of the Pops. Then they came down with a crash. This tell-all insider’s look at the 70s punk scene mixes brutal humour with a sharp critique of the human condition from the point of view of a working class man. Haynes share his experience with The Sex Pistols, The Clash and many more classic bands and writes about what punk was really about.
A celebration of the creativity of graffiti artists from all over the world. Ever controversial, graffiti or street art has become a significant art form and continues to evolve and transform urban landscapes in cities around the globe. Compiled by an insider on the New York graffiti scene, KET, this is a collection of the work of some of the world’s top graffiti artists. Showcases work from artists such as Banksy (London), Can2 (Munich), T-Kid (New York), Os Gemeos (Sao Paolo) and many more. Graffiti Planet is a perfect companion to this dynamic and vibrant art form.
Bonkers correspondence to and rom UK punk artists during 2020. Whimsical and comical by turns, it features lots of the late 70’S/early 80’S punk bands including Cock Sparrer, Angelic Upstarts, Red Alert, The Blitz, Screaming Dead, Gonads, Zips and Those Naughty Lumps.
The poems in Grimalkin – Thomas Lynch’s first publication in Britain are all concerned, in one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. In each poem, Lynch is looking for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces: the gravities of sex and death, love and grief – all the things that make us breathless and horizontal, mortal and memorable.
By means of a wry, mordant wit, telling observation and glorious poise, we are shown the strong tensions that make us human: the forces in our nature that create, replicate, restore, renew us; and those that kill us, constrict our lives, silence us. From spirited invective to meditations on morality, from lyrics of love and desire to a corrosive flyting to his ex-wife, these poems explore an extraordinary emotional range and technical facility but, more importantly, they reveal a compassionate, wise, and genial humanity.
‘A remarkably self-assured first collection, enjoying all the usual Carcanet virtues of precision, subtlety and understatement.’ – The Morning Star
Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets ‘worn into themselves like grafted skin’, corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns.
Horrex – whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet’s New Poetries series – unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the ‘growlery’ of Dickens’ Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.
Samhain is a young, angry and bewildered squatter living in an abandoned hotel in the North of England. One day he receives a message: his father – a man he never knew – was an undercover policeman infiltrating the Green movement of the 80s. What’s more, he finds out that he too is now a father. As Sam leaves for Europe, he pursues freedom and flees from his responsibilities. Responsibility, however, is hard to escape. Guest is a story of disillusionment, protest and, eventually, redemption.
SJ Bradley is a writer from Leeds and one of the organisers behind Fictions of Every Kind. She won the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Gladstone Writers in Residency Award. Her debut novel, Brick Mother, was published by Dead Ink in 2014.
Gumiguru is the tenth month of the Shona calendar – a month of dryness and heat before the first rains fall and rejuvenate the land. Togara Muzanenhamo’s second collection is a cycle of poems distilling the experiences of a decade into one calendar year, framed through the natural and agricultural landscapes of Zimbabwe. The book stands as both an elegy for the poet’s father and a hymn to the veldt, the farms and villages, and the men and women whose lives are interwoven with the land and the changing seasons.
Hair Everywhere is the story of one family and how they manage to cope when the mother is diagnosed with cancer. It is a delicate tale that balances itself between the generations, revealing their strengths and weaknesses in times of trouble. It is also a story about how roles within a family can change when things become challenging, due to sickness or death, allowing some to grow and others to fade. Ultimately, this is a book about life; full of humour and absurdity as well as sadness, and set against an everyday background where the ordinary takes on new significance and colour. Tea Tulic’s debut novel is a brave glance at the human condition.
This book uses popular Brazilian songs to teach you the basics of the Brazilian Guitar style and technique. Learn to play in the styles of Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfá, Baden Powell, Dino Sete Cordas, Joao Basco and many others.
This collection features 31 of Sting’s definitive hits, including: ‘Brand New Day’, ‘Englishman in New York’, ‘Fields of Gold’, ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ and many more.
Featuring in-depth lessons and 40 great jazz classics, the Hal Leonard Jazz Guitar Method is your complete guide to learning jazz guitar. Songs include: ‘Satin Doll’, ‘Take the A Train’, ‘Billie’s Bounce’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Bluesette’ and more.
This book teaches the techniques, licks, chords, scales and strums you need to play rockabilly guitar. It shows you how to play rhythm & lead for all kinds of rockabilly grooves, in the style of masters such as Carl Perkins, Brian Setzer, Cliff Gallup, Buddy Holly, Scotty Moore and others. Instead of learning exercises, you learn the classic rockabilly songs and solos that made the genre come together in the first place. The 58 audio tracks will help you catch the rhythms and nuances of the rockabilly style. Songs include: Be-Bop-A-Lula * Get Rhythm * Honey Don’t * Milk Cow Blues * No Particular Place to Go * Rock Around the Clock * Rock This Town * Susie-Q * Train Kept A-Rollin’ * and more!
This is a book that lives in two parts – one set in the Ottoman empire of the 16th century, and the other in our own 21st century reality. Here we have the story of two friends, both taken as children from their homes and inducted into the Turkish Sultan’s private guard: Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Serbian shepherd boy who rose to the position of Grand Vizier and Koca Mimar Sinan, the ‘Michelangelo of the East’. Between them they represent both destruction and creation, while at the same time providing us with a harrowing insight into the heart of religion and identity. Back in our own time, we hear the voice of the author, sharing with us his experiences in the modern world, and his musings on faith, identity and nation. This is a truly ambitious book that rewards the reader with insights into some of the great questions of our time.
W. H. Auden, in his essay, The Poet and the City, (the Dyer’s Hand, 1962), starts with a quote by H. D. Thoreau: “There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living…….One would never think, from looking at literature, that this question had ever disturbed a solitary individual’s musings.”
Auden covers much in this essay, but it’s his concept of the modern hero which is relevant here: “the man or woman in any walk of life who, despite all the impersonal pressures of modern society, manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own.”
In Geoff Hattersley’s latest collection, Harmonica, we have Auden’s hero; in fact, a succession of them. These are heroes battling against the complexity, confusion, drudgery and relentlessness of making ends meet.
This collection is appealing on many levels: for its simple language, the way he maps the struggle against these ‘impersonal pressures’, the optimism you unearth as you read more deeply, and the love of people.
From Booker-Prize winning novelist Stanley Middleton.
Thomas Harris is on the cusp of success as a classical composer with a growing reputation.
When his father, a coal miner, dies Thomas decides to write a requiem for him which is also a thinly veiled attack on the powerful elite. In spite of opposition he finally succeeds in getting his work performed but how will the critics react?
A new collection from the award-winning Magnum photographer.
A master of colour-saturated images, Harry Gruyaert has roamed the world searching for the perfect light for more than forty years. His very intuitive and physical sense of place immerses the spectator in a world that borrows simultaneously from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter. Dissolving the boundaries between the exterior and interior, Between Worlds offers just such a sensory immersion.
No matter the setting, the country or the era, Gruyaert deploys a luminous alchemy suspended in time. Where are we? It doesn’t matter: in Gruyaert’s world, the pleasure of getting lost reigns.
From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood. Haunted Houses is the story of three young women. Jane’s occasionally violent father reads her the Gettysburg Address at bedtimes, while Emily’s parents are FDR Democrats who only privately concede she may be normal. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people. Tillman charts the girls’ unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance – family, gender, culture – that a girl must swallow or rebel against. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history. In prose that is uncanny and precise, it showcases Lynne Tillman at her boldest and most trenchant.
Heine’s poetry is as funny as it is biting. These translations capture his wicked wit and incisive irony as he exposes the hypocrisies and ills of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.
